The Backs of Hurricanes
by wingedraksha
Summary: He didn't expect this girl, this girl who smells like God. Now, Bella is trapped in a new kind of game, and how do you win if there are no more rules? Bella/James, an alternate ending.
1. Taken

**A/N: I can't believe I wrote a Twilight story. I really, really can't. I'm in the "it's ridiculous" camp. But I think James is really hot, and I thought the scene with he and Bella in the ballet studio was the best part of that whole movie, so...**

Smell. Scent. The quick flare of nostrils, the rush of air, the heady spiced musk of blood and sweat, all salt and skin and _life_. It's hard to explain, hard to understand, hard to quantify the impossibility of ignoring this draw. Add that to the rhythm, the secret heat, the pulsing fragile miraculous _heartbeat... _He didn't need to _see_ her in the field to know, in the deepest, basest part of him, that there would be killing here. Some kind of killing, anyway, and that wasn't even the important part. Not worth the focus.

Now, in this glassy dark place, her scent was strong again and he felt that knowledge rise up like a hot tide. He couldn't see her yet; she was hovering outside, perhaps, gathering the courage to enter. But she was close. She was close, and her boy was not, and he could feel her pulse beneath his skin like a drum.

She was slow walking in. Hesitant. Careful. She moved like a deer, that tired comparison, thin long legs picking across the studio floor as if each step might be her last. Blind. Breathing hard, the dark hair tumbling around her neck in thick tossing falls. She was afraid. Of course she was afraid. He closed his eyes and he could _feel_ it, vibrating through the air, humming up beneath the dirt that smeared his forearms and the dried blood crusting around his nails. He could feel her intake of breath, the shuddery layer of fear beneath her voice as she called for her mother, as she stepped further away from the light, as his trap snicked shut.

When he caught her it was fast, a slick sidestep around the door, his body slicing through her shocked realization faster than she could register. He could see it in those chocolate eyes, the stunned horror, the knowledge that she'd been tricked, shattering. And then he was on her, one arm smoothly shoving her against the wall as her fragile human body bent where he pushed, her broken-down doe eyes refusing to meet his.

"That was easier than I'd hoped," he told her, enjoying the way his words made her chest buzz against his, their bodies close, a mockery of intimacy. Her throat was warm against his arm, the whole of her warm, her hair so soft against the frail thin skin. Translucent. So delicate. It made him want to hurt her, to break her, to leave some kind of mark.

She smelled, right here, like God.

He brought up the video camera, unsteady hand zooming in too close on her face. Those eyes.

"Hi, Bella," James said. "Edward, whenever you watch this, tell Alice I say hello."

"Screw you," is what the girl said then, and James laughed.

"Dangerous words, sweetheart..." He licked her chin, fast, tongue darting from the line of her jaw up to the corner of her mouth. She gasped, eyes shuddering closed, and the muscle in her throat tensed beautifully. He wanted her, he wanted the blood and the salt and the sweat, he wanted that gasp. "Look at this, Edward," he told the camera, holding it at an angle to catch the human's white cheek as he twisted his hand and drew a nail along her cheekbone. Blood beaded along the scratch, and Bella started to cry. He bent his head and kissed her cheek, tasting the blood and the tear and pressing into her with the delicious agony in that taste. The girl jerked her head away.

"Don't touch me!" she snarled, surprising him. The fire in her excited him, but there was anger, too. He narrowed his eyes, the camera mostly forgotten, and snarled back.

"I do what I want," he told her sharply, dropping the camera and sliding his free hand up her waist beneath her shirt, pinning her. "Edward might play around with acting human, but I won't." He kissed her on the mouth, forcing her head back, biting her lower lip just hard enough to make her yelp into his mouth. The sound pleased him, and he gentled the kiss, Edward Cullen the last thing on his mind. She was so soft, this human girlchild, so wickedly breakable. Her lips. Her waist.

It was instantaneous and shocking, the shift. He felt it before she did, enjoyed the surge of smug triumph even before her eyes snapped open in stunned horror.

When she yanked her head away, slamming it against the wall, he let her. A small victory, in exchange for a much greater one.

"Liked that, did you?" he asked her, inhaling the new mix of smells washing over him. Fear, fury... and lust. He couldn't smell himself, but the reflection in her wide dark eyes was enough.

"Go to hell!" He laughed at her, at Bella Swan, and shook his head.

"Oh, this is even better than I thought it could be. This is _perfect_." Big brown eyes squeezed shut, chest heaving against his. She wouldn't say more. She wouldn't give him more. Well, then, he would _make_her give him more.

He kissed her again, cold mouth almost too rough, delighted with this change of plans, delighted with the wildness, with his wildness. There was something about a human, it was true. Something about that fluttering angry heat, the way their heartbeats sped up and jittered about beneath all that thin skin... The girl had stopped fighting now, helpless, not quite kissing back but not quite resisting the urge. The knowledge that she hated him, feared him, didn't understand any of this, and he'd won her just the same-- was more powerful than he'd expected. More enticing... intriguing, even.

As he pulled away for a second time and let her catch her breath, breath that he hadn't needed for decades, James had a whole new plan circling behind his hunger-blackened eyes.

When he picked her up, arms wrapping around her legs and torso tightly enough that no amount of struggling would break his grip, she let out a sob. When he kicked the video camera out of his way and flickered out of the studio, moving nearly too fast for a human to see, she squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her face against his chest in a move that was clearly reluctant, and just as clearly necessary. And when he whispered to her, low and dark and smiling, about the new future he had planned, she let her shuddering living pulse answer him.

**NEXT:**

_...the suffocating pressure on my throat and the thick agony of my tongue choking on whatever plea I might have come up with. His eyes, his red eyes, darkening to a roiling sort of storm-black, dropped to my lip. Blood, I remembered with a hysterical thrill, blood on my lip, salt, bitten lip..._


	2. Animal

**A/N: Ok, so I intended that to be a one-shot, but then people were all psyched for more so I went ahead and kept it up. I plan on keeping mostly from Bella's POV, with occasional forays into James' perspective, as in Chapter Uno. So. Hopefully you'll like?**

I fell asleep. My life ending, my heart breaking, my mouth dark and sour with fear... and I fell asleep. It was something in the steady loping pace my captor maintained, in the clench of his arms around me, in the deceptive warmth of the jacket pressed against my cheek. If I closed my eyes, I maybe thought, it could almost be Edward carrying me.

And when I woke up, the earthy muddy scent of a wild animal all around, I was alone.

Cold. That was the first thing I noticed, bleary, eyes all sticking. It was chilly, and uncomfortable, and there was no thick jacket to pillow my head. No arms clamped around me, either, and no pounding terror, but I was sure that last would come as soon as my body caught up to my mind. I sat up, managing at least that, and noticed a few more things.

I was in a bathroom, for one. In the bathtub, to be specific. I put a hand out and touched the low plastic rim of the tub, my hand brushing against the bunched-up sheet of curtain at one corner. The light was off, dim odd shadows sprawling across the yellowy tile floor. A sink built into the small counter to the left of the door, which was closed. A toilet between that and the shower/tub I was huddled in. The whole room was small, small enough that I couldn't have laid down with my feet flat against the door without my head hitting the rim of the tub. A motel, then. Not nice enough for a real hotel. Only two towels, thin, hanging from the metal bar on one wall. Registering that, I shook my head. Not important. God, who cared about _towels_?

Getting to my feet was hard. The tub felt slick, even through my shoes, and there was nothing to grab onto besides the curtain. I was afraid of that curtain. I was afraid of this place, of being in this little tub where my own personal Norman Bates could attack at any moment, except no, of course not, because the door is _shut_, can't you see that?

"Come on, Bells," I gritted out, and got out of the goddamn tub.

As I passed the mirror above the sink, I had to force my eyes away from my stark reflection. Too pale, the shadows under my eyes too purple. I looked ill. I looked dead. _Not yet_, I told myself, remembering the words I may or may not have heard when he took me. When James took me. I thought I remembered a murmur, a smug trick of the ear, a promise to... to what? To keep me? If that had been it, what did that _mean_? Change me, make me one of his kind? Keep me as a human plaything? If he wanted to hurt Edward, I couldn't tell which would be more effective. At that thought, a needle of pain spiked through me.

Edward.

Shame, cold and sick and _moving_, swept down my chest into my stomach. I'd betrayed him. I'd betrayed him for a madman, a killer, a cruel sadistic monster that was everything Edward fought to escape, and I'd done it in the most intimate, impossible way imaginable. I'd let James kiss me. And I'd enjoyed it.

I couldn't stay there, in my head. I couldn't allow myself to hear those words again, to replay that awful pleasure, and so I pressed the side of my head against the bathroom door and closed my eyes and concentrated on listening as hard as I could. Nothing but a faint buzzing, a sound that could have been a television, could have been air conditioning, could have been my own blood humming in my ears. A weapon. Whether he was out there or not, I needed a weapon. I needed, for more reasons than one, to put up a fight, no matter how stupidly futile. (If I fought back, maybe it wouldn't be true, maybe it wouldn't be real-) My tongue felt thick as I turned, eyes scanning the bathroom once more, and when my hand went up I could see it shaking.

_Get it together, girl. Get it the fuck together._

Nothing on the sink, no cabinet behind the mirror, no bottles of shampoo to throw. Toilet paper, but what good would that do? Towels, but nothing to wrap in them to give them weight, and it wasn't like I could strangle him... My eyes moved up, caught, held. The towel rack. My feet ate the floor in one large step, and I was tossing the towels in the tub before I registered my own movement. The rack was a single bar of some kind of steel, fixed to the wall on either side by a metal plate bolted to the plaster. I tugged at it. Nothing. Biting my lower lip, I tried to jam it to one side, to loosen one of the plates. My hands slipped, fingers slamming into metal, and I swallowed a yelp of pain.

"Ok," I breathed, "it's ok. This is ok." More pressure. More strength. I needed to be stronger. I needed to be... not me. Bracing one knee against the wall just below the bar, I readjusted my grip and, with a deep breath, shoved as hard as I could while using my entire body weight to yank at the rack. To my utter shock, it gave. I fell backwards, the bar in my hands, and went down hard. My skull cracked against the counter the sink was built into, my tailbone slamming into the floor with enough force to bring harsh, agonized tears to my eyes. My teeth, still clamped around my lip, drew blood.

But I had the bar.

Nearly two feet long, it was heavier than I'd expected. I stood slowly, wincing, ignoring the throbbing ache in the back of my head. I could taste salt in my mouth, on my tongue, and as I flipped the bar and steadied my grip low at the base, I felt more alive than I had in weeks. Holding the bar over one shoulder, poised to de-brain whoever happened to be standing on the other side of that door, I reached for the knob.

When the door didn't open, I was so surprised I couldn't do anything but stand there, dumb, utterly confused. I tried the knob again. It turned; no lock. I tried pulling the door in towards me. Nothing. Then, a loud scraping from the other side. Heart nearly stopping, I jolted back away from the door and clenched my fists so tightly around the metal that they stung. Sweat trickled into my eyes, I blinked it away. This was a different kind of fear, a kind I hadn't felt entering the ballet studio or even when he'd first caught me. This was a knowing kind, a sly kind, an unstoppable numbing shake-your-bones fear, and oh god the door, the door, it was opening.

I swung the bar like a baseball bat, because I've always been _so_ good at baseball. Now, though, bringing it over my shoulder and down with as much force as I could muster, with a scream too hoarse to penetrate the walls of this sad little place, I could hear the air whistle past it and I knew that if I hit something, by god, I'd fucking kill it.

So when he caught the bar by the square, jagged-edged metal plate still attached to the end, moving like smooth pale lightning, I heard the horrid thick wrong sound of steel on flesh and felt the jarring kick of impact that shuddered right up into my elbows and I fell to my knees in the way you fall when you're shot.

I didn't even pause, in my mind, between animal fury and utter despair. No hesitation, no maybes, no stops between the moment I swung and the moment he caught. So completely did he stop my attack that, with no more than a jerk of his wrist, the bar was ripped from my fingers and tossed back into the room behind him.

James had me by the throat in an instant, almost as soon as my knees hit the floor, and up against the bathroom wall in the next. My feet dangled several inches above the ground, kicking impossibly against his shins as he held me one-handed. I beat at him with my fists, scraping my nails down his cheeks, aware of nothing but the suffocating pressure on my throat and the thick agony of my tongue choking on whatever plea I might have come up with. His eyes, his red eyes, darkening to a roiling sort of storm-black, dropped to my lip. Blood, I remembered with a hysterical thrill, blood on my lip, salt, bitten lip.

"You," the blond vampire said casually, the kind of casual where you know if you touch anything, move anything, everything will rupture, "are very stupid." There were spots in my vision now, horrifying dark splotches that fuzzed and molded until I could feel my eyes beginning to roll up as my brain began the shut-down sequence. And then, as sharply as he'd lifted me, James let me go. I crumpled to the ground, no delicate faints for this one, every piece of me collapsing all at once. I could see, as I lay coughing and choking on the linoleum, bits of dried mud and grass caked against the sides of his boots. When he hunkered down and reached for my face, I tried to smack his hand away, still mostly concerned with filling my lungs with that painful, glorious oxygen. He ignored this, and swiped a thumb across my lower lip. Brought it away bloody, raised it to his lips, licked it clean. His eyes flashed darker than there were words to describe, a slow rising hum in the air, and I understood that this was the part where I died. Not for my mother, not for Edward, not even for myself. For him.

So when he stood abruptly, the pulsing non-heat of him backing off, I didn't know what to do other than just lay there, numb, useless, shell-shocked.

"I won't lock you in again," he said coolly. "Not in the bathroom, anyway. Get up." Carefully, gingerly, I did. He was standing there, in front of me, jeans and a t-shirt and death in his eyes, and he wasn't killing me. _Oh, god, _I thought, not daring to look away from his face. _Oh, god._ James backed up a step, letting me see the room the bathroom led into. There was a dresser, heavy wood, standing at an angle. He'd used it to block the bathroom door, to keep me in. My gaze skittered from him to the room, him to the room, taking in the twin beds, the TV, the... pizza box? I frowned, and the vampire's lips quirked in what could have been a smile, but the kind Hannibal Lecter might have made. "Hungry?" he asked me, tilting his head towards the pizza.

"What do you care?" I responded, keeping my chin low, eyes on his, unable to keep from holding myself like there was the slightest chance of escaping if he went for me again.

"I don't, really," he said honestly, inhaling. His eyes dropped to my mouth, and I swallowed. "But you're too thin as it is, and I'm not dealing with you fainting all the time. Malnutrition is a bitch." My lips parted, brow furrowing, not entirely sure I was hearing correctly. There was a pressure in the room, despite the lightness of his tone, and those demon eyes were flickering. Maybe it was the terror, maybe I was hallucinating. Auditory hallucination, surely that was possible under stress? But I didn't hear anything else, and after a moment, James backed into the room proper and flashed across to the one window. Opening it, leaving me standing in the doorway, he twisted his head in the slight breeze.

"Come on, then," he said, turning slowly, panther-like. He wasn't moving, wasn't doing anything but watching, the loose strands of hair drifting across one cheek... and yet I couldn't help but feel...

Hunted.

**Please review! I haven't quite started to really feel this story yet, and reviews will help convince me it's worth it...**

**NEXT:**

_"Oh, Bella," he said wickedly, moving his head back, slowly, inhaling, "what would Eddie say?"_


	3. Tenuous

**A/N: Thanks, those of you who reviewed! It really makes my day, as I'm sure you know. Also, I think I actually know where I want to take this story, so that's good news, right? Keep showing the love, mes amis!**

The pizza was cheese. Domino's. The kind with the little peppers in the corner, and a tiny plastic pot of garlic sauce. As I forced myself to eat a slice, hyperaware of his eyes on me from the window, I felt the uncontrollable need to giggle and nearly choked holding it back. Garlic sauce. _God, if only he were Dracula_, I thought, eyes on the little labeled container, _I could chuck it at him and he'd… what, melt? Thanks, Bram Stoker_. But this was no literary monster, and I was no Van Helsing.

I managed the one slice, and then folded the box closed, looking up. He was leaning against the wall now, arms crossed, the lean muscles of his forearms sharp and clear against the dark fabric of his shirt. My eyes caught on those arms, then darted up to his face with an inner shudder. I couldn't honestly tell you what my mind was doing then; was this harsh little tug in my gut one of fear, or attraction? The fact that I couldn't tell the difference scared me more than the idea of either.

"So," James said dryly, seeing I was done. "Welcome to the first time I've helped a human in fifty years. We hope you enjoy your stay." I couldn't stop the scoff.

"'Helped'? This is helping?"

"Well," he said, pushing away from the wall to stroll over by the bed I was sitting on, "you're not bleeding in a corner somewhere, are you?" He smiled at me, showing just a glint of white, white teeth. "Which would you prefer, dinner or… _dinner_?" I shivered at the pointed way his eyes dropped to my throat, and slid off the bed to stand with it between us.

"What are you going to do to me?" I asked, instead of the more generic _What are you doing? _that I had considered. After all, in the end, did it really matter what _he_ was doing? The bathroom was behind me, but not directly enough that I could back into it fast enough to beat him if he used that frightening vampire speed, but at least with the mattress in the way I might have a bit of warning if he decided he didn't want to deal with my questions after all… But James didn't growl, didn't lower his chin in that big-cat threat. He cocked his head, strong features flickering with an emotion I couldn't quite place. Amusement? Curiosity? Smugness? Maybe all three.

"I'm going to… experiment," he replied after a moment, a dangerous, chuckling emphasis on the word. "And then I'm going to kill you." The laugh broke from me like water through a dam, short and breathless and afraid. I was backing up, backing up despite myself, despite everything, and he was just standing there all cool and deadly and without a goddamn care.

"Why not just do it now, then?" I asked recklessly, unable to just keep my mouth shut and accept it, unable to allow him to just _stand_ there like it didn't even matter if I moved or not, because of course it_didn't_ really matter, because of course he could catch me whenever he wanted and I knew it.

"I told you," James said, and then he was

right

_there_

and I felt my heart stutter as his head ducked beside my own, hands slamming against the wall behind me on either side of my shoulders, mouth hovering above the erratic throb of my jugular. He grinned, grinned against my throat, and I could feel his lips on my skin and I couldn't do anything but stand, staring straight ahead, frozen, every cell in my body screaming with the need to do something, anything, anything other than this stupid helpless statue play.

"I'm _trying new things_," he told me, with the air of one who has repeated something too many times, but there wasn't anger in the words. There was that damned amusement, like my terror was _cute_. "A new kind of hunt."

"Oh, my god," I whispered, lips barely moving over the prayer, and he chuckled, unnecessary air moving across my neck. I didn't know what he meant, still didn't know what the hell it was he _meant_, but now I was feeling his mouth on mine even though he hadn't moved, I was feeling those cool sure lips and smelling the dirt and the trees and the untamed mix of water and blood in his hair, animal sweat, and oh_god_ it was hard not to want him beneath it all.

"Oh, Bella," he said wickedly, moving his head back, slowly, inhaling, "what would Eddie say?"

I brought my knee up hard, connecting awkwardly with somewhere on his lower abdomen. I knew it didn't hurt him, but the move startled James enough that he rocked backwards and I used both hands to shove him in the chest as hard as I could. When he fell back a step, all this happening in seconds, I ducked under his retreating arm and ran.

When he caught me, it was two steps from the motel room door. I was reaching for the knob, all my breath one ragged gasp, my fingers scraping against the metal knob even as an arm snaked around my waist and jerked me backwards with enough force to lift my feet clear off the ground. Voices in my head were yammering, desperate, so fucking close and never ever going to be enough.

"No!" I cried, scrabbling with my arms as if that would help force me through the air, feeling my stomach drop as James twisted around and flung me behind him. I went down hard on my back on the floor, skidding a foot before I slammed against the far wall, smacking my elbow hard enough to make me scream again. James crouched at the foot of the bed closest to the door, clearly ready to lunge, blocking any possible path to the door with both hands curled into claws and all those sharp white teeth bared in a feral snarl.

"You're not going anywhere," he hissed, eyes swirling darker, entire body locked in a wild electricity that pulsed outwards and zapped against my skin. My breath caught in my chest, my eyes wider than I thought they'd ever been.

"Don't," I said, my voice almost too soft to be heard and too conversational to be real, "please, don't." He rose out of the crouch and stalked closer, sneering.

"Don't what?" I couldn't make my eyes move higher than his knees.

"Don't hurt me," I said quickly, a quiet tumbling rush, and James folded into a kneel. He bent down and used two fingers to force my chin up until our eyes met.

"If you try to run again," he told me evenly, the cruel pleasure missing from that cold, gentle voice, "I'll break your legs." He waited, shining red eyes boring into mine. "Understand?"

"Yes," I whispered, terrified. There was something about that gentleness that scared me more than the snarl ever had.

"Good," he told me, and brought his face close enough to mine that I could feel my own shaky breath reflected off his skin. I was afraid he'd kiss me again, but instead he just held us there, in suspension, a look in his eyes I couldn't have read if I'd wanted to. And then he let me go, and stood, and walked over to sit on one of the beds. "We'll be moving in a few hours. As soon as dusk hits." Dusk? So I'd been gone a day. They'd be looking for me by now. Why hadn't Alice seen this? Why hadn't someone tracked us yet?

Shakily, I got to my feet and moved to sit gingerly on the second bed. James stretched out on his back, pillowing his head with his arms and crossing his legs at the ankle with the sort of lazy grace I would never, ever have. He wasn't looking at me anymore, but I couldn't shake the fear that if I looked away, let my guard down in the slightest, he'd be on me in a flash.

"Relax," James said suddenly, as if he'd heard that fear. I flinched at the sound of his voice, and then hated myself for it. "If you do as I say, everything will be fine."

"Until you kill me," I said, once again letting my mouth say things my brain hadn't okay-d. He just smiled.

**NEXT:**

_"Stealing a car is a little conspicuous for you, isn't it?"_

_"Less conspicuous than running around with an unconscious girl in my arms..."_


	4. Dazzle

**Whoa, 14 reviews last chapter! That's awesome. That's amazing. That's mind-blowing! For the love of all things sexy, keep it up! (Oh, and someone asked for lemons; believe me, they are coming. My integrity as a writer won't let me throw something totally out of character in without build-up, that's all.)**

It was a very tense several hours before James finally levered himself off the bed and announced our eminent departure. I'd spent them first sitting awkwardly, completely still, and then carefully lowering myself onto the mattress after the shooting pains in my lower back got to be more than I was willing to ignore. Finally, by the time James rolled lightly onto his feet, I was curled gingerly on my side, trying to find a balance between being comfortable and being totally aware of and in control of my surroundings. One hand was curled beneath my head, the other palm flat against the mattress below my chin, my eyes fixed on the bedspread that draped over the edge of the mattress James was sprawled across.

I could see the denim of his jeans and the edge of one boot in the very top of my field of vision, and I made a point of focusing my attention on the bedding just beneath it so that I wouldn't have to really look at him, but I'd know it if he budged. He did not, in all those hours. It must have been three or four. A few times I felt myself dozing, despite the situation; it's something about being in one place for a long period of time that makes the brain start its shutdown almost automatically.

And then, without warning, his leg disappeared and I sat up in time to see him shaking out his shoulders, mussed ponytail whipping around his neck, looking for all the world like a tall, lean jungle cat or a big, wet, jeans-clad dog. In the split seconds before he gathered himself into that cord of self-composure, I felt an odd and unwelcome jolt of… well, of something, anyway. Not the scary, brilliant desire I'd felt before; this was more like the feeling you get when you see your little brother who's just spent an hour being a total bastard trip and fall over and shake his head in confusion, that sort of "Oh, _you_," an almost endearing shock. And the realization that, killer instincts and death threats be damned, he was some kind of beautiful.

Then he was standing at the door, shrugging into his beaten old jacket, one hand extended towards me as one blond brow rose in impatience. I got up at once, then sort of made up for it by taking my time smoothing out my own jeans and wrinkled shirt before I went to him. The hand was still there, waiting, and after a frightening moment where I stood stock still and James' upper lip began to curl, I reluctantly took it.

His hand was cold, unsurprisingly, and thin, and very strong. There was a threat in the way his fingers wrapped around mine that was as clear and unmistakable as anything he could have said, and I swallowed as he pulled the motel room door open and led me out into the falsely lit hallway. I had a thought that maybe I could scream, now that we were out in a theoretically public place, that maybe if I just made the right noise (and enough of it) someone would realize that there actually _was_ a problem here with the dark-haired girl and her blond maybe-a-biker boyfriend. But as we made our way towards the exit at the far end, those grit-smeared fingers tightened around mine until my knuckles cracked and I had to bite back a gasp.

"Now, now," he murmured to me as we swept outside into the cool dim static of late evening, "remember our deal."

"Our deal?" I asked, just as quietly, eying the parking lot and sparsely scattered trees that lined it. I couldn't tell where we were; what with the pace he'd kept up after first leaving the studio, we could have been anywhere. My stomach dropped, the slight hope I'd entertained as we'd been leaving pinching out like a late-night candle.

"You don't run, I don't shatter at least one of the two major bones in your legs," he explained easily as we rounded a corner and headed for the front of the building. My stomach fell further, heart pounding as he dragged me almost too fast for my feet to follow: I could see an interstate sign from the front of the motel. That meant we were well away from town, and the number on the sign wasn't one I recognized. Granted, I only really knew one interstate road by name, but still, the fact that I couldn't tell which road we were near, let alone which state, was… disheartening.

"Where are we?" It was worth a shot, after all. James was pulling me towards the glassed-in lobby of the motel, and as he opened the door with his free hand he let go of mine and immediately wrapped that arm around my waist to tug me up against his side. I stumbled, automatically flinging my newly-freed arm up to steady myself against his back. This made him chuckle, and though I dropped my arm instantly there was no other comfortable way to walk. We were close enough that my right arm couldn't actually fit between us, and he was holding me so tightly that I had to keep in step with him or fall over. Awkward, uncomfortable, burning with embarrassment and a long-awaited anger, I lifted my arm again and rested it just above the hem of his jacket, my hand clenched into a fist at his right hip.

James marched me up to the counter without a word, radiating satisfaction. I hated him. I hated him. I hated him. He opened his mouth, and I hated that. He started talking to the young woman behind the counter, and I hated every word. She shook her head and told us that she was sorry, but she really couldn't give him money back from his account after he paid for the room. James, gripping the top of my hipbone between his thumb and index finger with just enough pressure that I knew to keep my mouth shut, slowly leaned forward across the faux-wooden counter.

"I know you're not _supposed_ to," he said to the woman, and I wondered if he'd put in contacts and I had somehow missed it. But no, I saw, as I glanced up at his face; his eyes were just a muddier shade of red that, in this light, could pass as a deep, burnt brown. "But I'd be… _very_… grateful..." She was looking him in the eyes now, mouth slightly open, having completely forgotten my existence. I was pinned to his side, my reluctant arm around his waist, and it was like I wasn't there at all. I looked from James' face, suddenly more sensual than scary, to the half-vacant smile tugging at the desk clerk's lips. He was dazzling her, right in front of me, without the slightest hint of shame. Unwillingly fascinated, I watched him tilt his head at _just_ the right angle, watched her eyes flutter and go hooded, watched his chin duck suggestively.

"Well," she said woozily, tongue slipping over the words, "I suppose I could maybe do it just this once…"

"Just this once," he agreed, and his voice had fallen into a smooth, molasses hush. I swallowed, blinking away the sound. _It doesn't work on you_, I reminded myself, forcing my breath to even out_. _"It'll be our little secret… Susan," he added, apparently having finally bothered to check her nametag. And then he pushed across a credit card, which for some reason surprised me more than it probably should have, and after a moment accepted it back atop the small stack of bills she handed him in return.

As we turned and headed for the door we'd come in through, James was humming beneath his breath. There was no specific tune, and I could barely even call it real humming… just a low, intimate vibration that reminded me of bees at a distance, or the sound a cat makes just before it outright purrs. For the first time, I wondered what it felt like to be the dazzler, rather than to be the human falling prey. Was it as strange, as intoxicating, as blurrily satisfying? Apparently so, at least to some degree.

It was only as we spilled out into the cricketed dark that I realized I'd relaxed my fist, and that my fingers had somehow slipped beneath the bottom edge of his jacket and were resting lightly against the fabric of his shirt, the edge of my pinky brushing against the roughened denim top hem of his jeans. I jerked my hand away, flinching as my arm brushed against his back, unable to really change position as he was clearly not letting me go. Mouth tightening, I refused to give him the satisfaction of continuing to watch my obvious dismay. Lifting my chin, I roughly stuck my hand back onto his waist just above the arch of his hipbone, letting my arm mold itself along his lower back without a word.

"Jealous?" he asked, a dark humor threading through his tone. I let him steer me towards the back of the parking lot, stiffly maintaining my grip on his waist. "Don't worry, Susan doesn't hold a candle to you."

"Don't flatter yourself," I snapped back, finally grateful for the fact that, even if I couldn't present any sort of threat at all physically, at least I could manage sharp retorts. As long as I wasn't bleeding. As long as his eyes weren't black. As long as there were no immediate threats of life-shattering pain. Couldn't win them all.

"I don't need to," he reminded me, stopping in front of a dark blue Taurus. "I can smell it."

"Jesus Christ," I muttered, using the anger I could still feel pulsing through me to hide the surreal awfulness of my general situation in life. "Nothing you could ever do would make _me_ jealous," I told him snidely, and his grip on my waist tightened a hair. He didn't answer, though, just broke the glass on the driver's side window and opened the door. Somehow, his silence worried me. It wasn't a "Now I'll hurt you" silence, or a "Well, you're probably right" silence. It was the kind of silence that says, "I know something you don't know," and means it in the worst possible way.

James unlocked the rest of the car and brought me around to the passenger side, folded me into the seat and then, reaching with one hand, flicked on the child safety lock on the inner rim of my door. Before I could say a word he knocked the door shut and loped around to the driver's side. He brushed a cursory hand across the leather of the seat, sending shards of glass sparkling down onto the asphalt at his feet, and then lifted himself into the car and pulled the door shut behind him. I stared in disbelief as James ducked below the steering wheel and, with a few quick movements blocked by his knee, hotwired the car. I shook my head, buckling my seatbelt automatically.

"Stealing a car is a little conspicuous for you, isn't it?"

"Less conspicuous than running around with an unconscious girl in my arms," he replied sardonically, and I had to concede the point. As James pulled out of the wide parking lot, it occurred to me that not since the ballet studio had he even mentioned his… his _friends_. One of them was gone, but the other? The woman? I risked a glance at him, catching only the stone profile, pale skin gleaming as we passed beneath a streetlamp. I wasn't stupid, though, despite all evidence to the contrary, and I knew that asking about the other vampire probably wouldn't be a great plan. Instead, I looked down at my hands and almost bit my lip before remembering that that might open up the wound I'd made earlier. After a long, heavy silence, I cleared my throat.

"Are you going to tell me where you're taking me?" I asked quietly, the bite gone from my tone.

"I don't know where I'm taking you," he answered lazily, the honesty unexpected. He didn't sound put out by this, and I remembered that he was a migrant anyway, a nomadic serial killer rather than a homebody. Silently, I curled a lip and sunk further down in my seat. James pulled onto the interstate, speeding up immediately and passing a shadowy white car close enough that a honk followed us through the night.

He looked at me, not even bothering to try to watch the road. I opened my mouth, closed it, clenched my teeth. I was waiting for the taunt, the sneer, the smug little reminder that he had the power here and I did not. It didn't come. Instead, he just narrowed those alien eyes and shook his head slightly before, finally, turning back to the highway.

**NEXT:**

_"Help me," I said instead, managing without difficulty to sound faint and scared. "I'm in trouble."_

_"H-here," he said immediately, reaching for my elbow. "Let's get you an ambulance!" We hadn't gotten more than two steps towards the cashier's counter before I felt it. Felt him._


	5. Blood

**Thanks for the reviews, lovelies! Keep 'em coming!**

We stopped for gas at around 1:30 AM. At that point, I was in a fugue state, my forehead pressed against the cold glass of my window, half-blinded by the constant, uneven flashes of headlights passing and receding. When James pulled into the gas kiosk just off of Exit 48 off I-15, I tried the door handle twice before remembering about the child lock.

"Are you hungry?" he asked, opening his door. "Thirsty?" I stared at him. He rolled his eyes. "If you want to make it worse for yourself, be my guest." And he got out of the car. As soon as he'd closed the door behind him, I wished I _had_ asked for something. Then, he would have had to go inside the actual building instead of just paying at the console. And if he'd gone inside…

I leaned across the partition between the two front seats and braced myself with one hand on the plush of the driver's side cushion.

"Water," I said, knowing he could hear me. "Water would be good." He glanced at me, eerily lit by the fluorescent light directly above us, the shadows on his face set in stark relief. There was a hint of irritation in the subtle twist of his mouth, but after inserting the nozzle, James brushed his hands off on his jeans and ducked to look at me through the broken window.

"The femur," he told me coolly, "is said to be the most painful bone to break." And then he straightened and walked casually across the tarmac towards the station.

I sat for a long moment, watching him go, something jumping in my throat. My heart, maybe. Then, the heavy glass door swung shut behind him and he disappeared behind a set of aisles, and I scrambled for the driver's side door handle. I pushed open the door just enough for me to slide through, and hoisted myself over the seat partition. My foot caught on the gearshift and I sprawled into the door, one palm slamming down onto the seat to catch my fall. I let out a shocked cry as sharp, cold pain sliced through my hand, didn't wait to find out what had caused it, and shoved myself out of the car.

As soon as my feet were on the ground, I scurried around the gas kiosk and pressed my back to the metal, breathing hard. Out of sight of the building proper, I lifted my left hand and, already shaking, looked down.

A long shard of glass stuck out of the meat of my lower palm, just below the base of my thumb. Leftover from the broken window, hiding in the seat cushion, sharp and cruel and blasé about possibly severing a nerve in my hand—_Calm down, Bella, it's fine. Just a cut. _All my fingers moved when I wiggled them, albeit through searing pain, so I clenched my teeth and hardened my face and yanked out the glass. The pain was immediate and intense, and I nearly doubled over as I dropped the shard with trembling fingers. I pressed my palm into my stomach, trying to stem the blood. There wasn't an undue amount; I hadn't, after all, severed anything… but there was enough to make me want a shirt that was easily ripped, so I could make some sort of bandage. If, that was, I could manage not to fall over and be sick.

Too much time wasted already. For all I knew, James was already on his way back to the car, and if he got here and I was still leaning against the other side of the kiosk trying not to throw up or faint…

I gathered myself together and peered around the corner of the console. Nothing. There were two other cars at the gas station, but the owners of both were inside buying snacks or using the restroom or just stretching their legs. Doing human things. Slowly, trying to generate an actual plan, I crept around the kiosk. Suddenly, it occurred to me that there was a way to get out of this, a way that should be the most simple thing in the world.

Just walk inside.

There were other people in the gas station. The drivers of the two cars, at least one clerk. There were video cameras. And there were first aid kits. If I could just get inside without James stopping me, I could tell someone that I'd been kidnapped, and who would question a girl with a stab wound in her hand? Especially against the word of someone who looked like James? And he wouldn't kill _all _of them, would he? He couldn't possibly just kill all of them. It was too public, too risky, too on-film.

Right?

I had no better ideas, and there was still no sign of James. What the hell was he doing in there, anyway? How long did it take to buy a bottle of water? Or had it really only been seconds since he'd entered? Had the shock and pain of pulling glass out of my palm blurred over my sense of immediate time? I hissed out a breath, and started jogging towards the building.

When I entered the station, the middle-aged man who held open the door for me stopped mid-smile, eyes on my wrist. I looked down. My palm, having come away from the mild compression of being held against my stomach, was bleeding again. Red streaks dripped down my wrist, smeared on my fingers, stained my shirt above my belly. Lips parting, I nearly laughed at the look of startled horror on the poor man's face. _Oh, if only you knew._

"Help me," I said instead, managing without difficulty to sound faint and scared. "I'm in trouble."

"H-here," he said immediately, reaching for my elbow. "Let's get you an ambulance!" We hadn't gotten more than two steps towards the cashier's counter before I felt it. Felt him.

James's arm smoothly circled my waist, halting our progress. He was standing behind me, so close that I could feel the rivets on his jacket against my back, the brush of his chin against the top of my head.

"I'm sorry," he said to the man, who faltered and let go of my arm. "She's… a little off. Had an accident in the car; I was just getting some first aid." He sounded so firm and self-confident that even _I_ believed him for a second. My would-be savior looked uncertain. I shook my head, holding out my bloody hand.

"He kidnapped me," I cried, feeling my freedom inches from my grasp. "Please, you have to call the police!" I tried to wrench myself away from James, but his grip was like iron. My heart sunk as I realized that, to the human, it would look like I wasn't even really trying to get away at all.

"Megan," James said to me, voice all caring, "that's enough. Let me help you."

"My name isn't Megan!" James was backing us up now, towards the door, and the man was giving me a look more filled with pity than with concern. Desperately, I felt tears well up. "_Help_ me!"

"It's okay," James insisted smoothly, "I'm taking you back to the home. You like it there, remember?"

"Oh, god," I moaned, the stranger already turning away from this uncomfortable little scene. James pushed the gas station door open behind him and herded me through.

As soon as we were out of the building, James's grip went from firm to painful as he dragged me around the corner to the darkened back wall of the station. There were two garbage cans and a rusting recycling container, but nothing and no one else. I was full-out crying when he spun me and slammed me up against the brick wall.

"Do you think you're clever?" he asked, voice low and vicious. "Do you think you're _brave_?" I shook my head mutely, wounded hand clutched up against my chest, tears streaming down my cheeks. I hadn't cried like this when he took me, and I hadn't cried at all in the motel room, and now I couldn't seem to stop. James was furious, shoved up against me, the anger vibrating around him.

And then his eyes slid down.

My breath halted.

Slowly, inexorably, James wrapped his fingers around my bloody wrist and lifted my hand to face level. I tried to resist, but it was like trying to stop a moving car with your pinky. My chest was shuddering, no oxygen going where I needed it, my eyes wide and salty and locked on his mouth. The hum was in the air again, that dangerous hungry rise, and I felt a low molten swirl of want even as James's nostrils flared with the scent of my blood. My tears stopped, drying cold on my cheeks, leaving nothing but the stutter of my heartbeat and the suspension of our two bodies.

Eyes on mine, black and hard and too deep to measure, James bent his head and licked a slow, rough path up my wrist to the base of my palm. I shivered, my right hand going blindly to his shoulder, my knees going weak and shaky. What was this? What was he _doing_ to me? Edward had never come close to this, had never allowed himself to let the beast loose around me, and while part of me thanked god for his self-control, some other part was reveling in the terrible helpless glory of it.

James licked his lips, savoring the taste, and smiled. That smile scared me, sent a bolt of sheer terror through the fuzzy heat of lust that I could neither understand nor control. Then, faster than I could track, like two separate photographs spliced together, he lowered his head again and covered the cut on my palm with his lips. His tongue worked around it until I had to swallow a cry; I twisted between him and the wall, agony writhing through me, unable to gather enough breath for a scream. At my movement, James made a low growling sound and stepped forward, eliminating any space between us. He slammed my wounded hand back against the wall beside my head, molding his body to mine as he let go of his grip on my wrist and slid both hands up my waist.

His head moved beside mine as if my cut palm were a mouth he was kissing, but his fingers worked their way beneath my shirt and splayed across my back like a lover's. He pressed me closer, one leg sliding between mine as I gasped, weakening, blood loss turning my vision spotty. My head was growing heavier, drooping towards his shoulder even as my right hand clawed up into his hair. My stomach was flipping, my shocked nervous system sending gibbering messages all over. _Make this stop! Keep it going! Get closer! That hurts! _The slipping heat I'd felt earlier raged now, and I turned my ankle around his and pulled his leg closer, wanting, _needing_, the pressure between my thighs. I moaned, shocked to hear the sound coming from _my_ lips, unable to understand the intensely sexual rush that played side by side with the pain. James laughed against my skin, a low, predatory sound, and one hand slid up beneath my bra. When his thumb brushed my nipple, a long, convulsive shudder wracked my frame and I clutched at the nape of his neck. I couldn't think. I couldn't think.

I was fading, though, could feel myself fading, the rough scrape of his teeth against my palm blurring into a steady burn. It was getting harder to breathe, and I could feel myself slumping against him, slipping down the wall, my wrist pinned above me.

I closed my eyes, head whirling.

Dark.

**NEXT:**

_"It seems weird," I began, examining my bandage, "you going out dancing."_

_"What, you can't see it?" He sounded almost playful, which was hard to compute after what I'd seen him do. I glanced at him, but he was watching the road._

_"Well. No."_


	6. Words

**Again, thanks for the reviews! They make me really happy, obviously. This story has really got me now; I'm writing it at breakneck speed... In fact, I'm already three chapters ahead. Which is good news for you guys, eh? Feel free to leave a comment with hugs; it'll make me smile...**

I woke up.

I _woke up_.

That was the second miracle of my life thus far. The first, of course, was—but I couldn't think about him now. I couldn't think about anything, really, but the steady throbbing ache that started at my palm and radiated up my forearm. Pushing myself up from my slumped position, I lifted my left hand and stared at the clean bandage that covered the palm, white and soft and supremely out of place.

"There's juice in the glove compartment," a voice came from my left. Dazedly, I turned my head. James was driving, eyes ahead, short ponytail curling at the nape of his neck. I wanted to touch it. He had soft hair, I recalled. Then, his words registered and I snapped myself truly awake.

"You didn't kill me," I said, fumbling with the glove compartment door. This seemed like something that needed to be pointed out, as if maybe once he heard it aloud, he'd realize his mistake.

"Too easy," he tossed back, every inch of him careless. Still, my eyes caught once more on my bandaged hand as I found a bottle of orange juice among a few CDs and a large packet of papers. He'd fixed me. He'd half-drained me, and then he'd fixed me, and now he'd bought me juice. Sugar, I remembered vaguely, was good after giving blood. _Giving blood_. The thought made me want to laugh and cry all at once.

"You didn't break my legs, either," I said, eying him carefully through my peripheral vision, untwisting the cap on the bottle to take a long sip. He gave a short laugh.

"Do you want me to?"

"No."

"Then shut up."

I shut up.

It was daylight. Early morning, but still day. I'd been out for several hours. The thought made my stomach clench. I'd been missing for over a day now, for at least thirty-six hours. Did they think I was dead? Why hadn't Alice seen _something_? Maybe she had, and they just couldn't get here. Or they couldn't tell where I was. I remembered the vagueness of her vision about where James would confront me, how I'd recognized it for what it was, but none of the vampires had. Maybe she just had an image, just James and I in some nonspecific place. I prayed she hadn't seen what he'd done to me behind the gas station, then quickly added that to the list of things I wasn't going to think about.

I checked the road signs we passed, running through my mental list of national landmarks as I did. When I saw the sign announcing our vague vicinity to Mount Rushmore, I breathed out shortly. South Dakota. Three states away from Forks. Not that knowing it helped anything. It wasn't like I could just jump out of the car and hitchhike, and I wasn't about to try escaping at a gas station again until I had a more solid plan. I did know, though, that I needed to get away. Now more than ever. If he could affect me like that… if James could make me feel that way… I _had_ to get away.

Thinking about James was bad. I was uneasy for a whole new reason now. He had left me alive, had made a point of healing me. Why? I remembered his promise to "try new things", his few words about a "new kind of hunt", and felt cold. He was still hunting me. But in what way? Did he want me as a sort of human pet, someone he could feed off of without killing? Was it all an elaborate, sadistic game to hurt Edward? Would he feed from me again, use that slippery vampire seduction, not even bother with the seduction and just rape me, in more ways than one? Or maybe it was just like he'd said, too easy. Maybe he wanted more of a challenge. Sickness curled through my gut and I realized that I was staring at James, having subconsciously scooted as far away from him on the seat as I could. My elbow was pressed uncomfortably against the car door, but I couldn't force myself to relax.

"I'm not going to eat you in the middle of I-90," he said, sounding mildly disgusted.

"But you're going to sometime," I responded flatly, and he rolled his head towards me with that smooth, predatory shrug.

"Maybe if you ask really nicely," James said, half-purring, and I shivered again. There was that wicked, angled smile.

"I don't see the point," I began, folding my arms and ignoring the ripple of warmth that smile sent down my spine, "of any of this. You bite me, then you bandage me. You feed me, then you say you'll kill me. You hunt me down, then you just run away and drag me with you."

"I'm a study in contradictions. And I didn't bite you, you were just stupid." He didn't sound angry yet, and the disgust had been replaced by amusement. He thought this was funny, did he?

"They're going to find you, you know," I replied coldly, finally saying what I'd waited until now for the courage for. "The Cullens. And then they're going to-"

"The Cullens," James interrupted, voice soft and smooth and deadly, "are going to find what I want them to find. And if you're lucky, it won't be your dead body." I swallowed, but pressed on. He was right, after all. He wouldn't kill me in the middle of the interstate.

"Why bother, though? Why kidnap me if you're not going to kill me right away? They'll just keep hunting you, and I thought you liked it the other way around." He laughed, startling me.

"What makes you so sure they'll keep coming for you?" he asked, sounding genuinely curious on top of the obvious cruelty. "We're not very good at love, you know. Not if there's an easier option."

"Edward loves me," I said sharply.

"You love _him_, maybe," James corrected, seeming to have forgotten about our original argument. "But believe me, given the choice between loving you and keeping himself all locked up nice and tight, and letting you go…" He trailed off. I frowned, unable to be furious at this line of reasoning. It was, after all, one I'd had myself. I clenched my jaw against the sadness that welled up at the thought.

"Maybe so, but no matter what he'd rather do about me, he'd never let _you_ have me."

"But I do," James countered simply, and though my lips parted, I couldn't think of a single thing to say. There was a long, even silence. "And besides," James said then, eyes firmly back on the road, "this game is turning out to be far more fun than I thought." He smiled. "Especially if Edward _does_ love you enough to follow."

"He does," I promised darkly, sitting back. "Why are you so cynical, anyway? What about your girlfriend?" It was another one of those questions I'd been too out of it to ask, but something about the strange banter we'd exchanged, along with the cloudy daylight, made the words come out. James glanced at me sharply, as if calculating my motives, then shook his head.

"Victoria," he said slowly, "is not my girlfriend."

"Sure looked like it," I muttered, and he grinned.

"Jealous again? My, my." But thankfully, he didn't give me a chance to come up with a not-so-witty retort. "We used each other," he explained, and I tried to pretend I wasn't interested. His voice, now that there were no undertones of threat or mockery, was… well, _nice_. Distressingly so. "She hunted with me, and I took her dancing." At that, I couldn't help a swift scoff.

"You took her dancing?" I repeated, disbelieving.

"Bought her clothes. Killed pretty things for her. She wanted me for sex and excitement, I wanted her for-"

"Ok," I broke in, feeling a blush start. I've never been good at hearing about other people's relationships casually, much less my own, and this was no different. James laughed.

"Anyway. We were… companions, partners. We understood each other." I frowned.

"If she was so great, why did you leave her?"

"I was with her for twelve _years_," he replied, as if that were obvious.

"So you got bored." He smirked.

"A better option presented itself." I shook my head.

"You think _I'm_ a better option than _her_?" I couldn't tell if I was supposed to feel flattered or horrified.

"A less predictable one, sure. And you bring the chance to piss off the Cullens, which is always a good time." Everything in me wanted to make a dumb snap about how the Cullens would be really amusing angry, right up until they ripped his head off. But I knew that would only spiral back into him threatening and me cowering, so I held my tongue. For a minute.

"It seems weird," I began, examining my bandage, "you going out dancing."

"What, you can't see it?" He sounded almost playful, which was hard to compute after what I'd seen him do. I glanced at him, but he was watching the road.

"Well. No."

"When you live through two hundred years of ballroom dancing to Euro-disco, you pick things up." Euro-disco. _Euro-disco_? I had a flash image of James bobbing around to some sort of fast French techno beat, dressed in silver jeans and spandex, and had to hold back a snort of helpless laughter. He caught the mild convulsion and raised a brow at the highway, lips quirking.

"If I don't kill you before we get the chance, I'll take you dancing, too," he said, his tone so light that I almost missed the first bit. My smile, hesitant but real, faltered and died. I took a breath, turning to face the window. _Get ahold of yourself, Bella_, I told myself, gut twisting. _Remember where you are._ I'd forgotten, in those brief moments. He'd been charming, I'd been stupid, and I'd forgotten.

The silence, as it grew between us, was very cold and very still.

**NEXT:**

_"I'm beginning to think," James remarked, as if he weren't gripping me by the throat, "that being nice to you is not the best way to get results..."_


	7. Doubt

**Ok, team, the moment we've all been waiting for is coming up! Next chapter! Woohoo! Thanks for all your lovely comments; I'm so glad to make you glad!**

That night we stopped at a small inn about four hours east of the Iowa border. I waited in the car while James booked a room, too lethargic and starving to consider another attempt to run. We were in the middle of a spread of corn fields as well, and getting out of the car would only mean having to find my way back along the unnamed highway until I found enough traffic to actually hitch, or running directly into the fields. Both of which would do nothing but give James a chance to exercise his sense of smell.

My thoughts circled like this all the while as I waited in the Taurus, finding all the reasons why I wasn't trying to run. I told myself they were reasons, anyway, but there was a quiet, sly piece of my brain that insisted another word was more appropriate: excuses.

_Oh, please,_ I thought, absently tracing the winding bandage on my hand with two fingers. _I wouldn't get anywhere if I got out of the car, and then he'd just hurt me again. Probably actually bite me, and wouldn't _that_ be fun?_

Still, the dark little voice tsked at me and shook its nonexistent head. _If a car appeared right now, _it said, _keys in the ignition, full tank of gas… would you take it?_

"Of course," I murmured aloud, wrapping my arms around my chest to stop the sudden chill. "Of course I would."

_But things are different now,_ that voice reminded me. _Maybe you don't know how, and maybe you don't know why, and maybe you don't know what exactly's changed… but you know it's true._ I rejected that idea, fighting with myself, brows furrowing as I shook my head. _It is_, my shadow-self insisted. _Edward or no Edward, it _is_._

Swallowing hard, I drew my feet up onto the seat and wrapped my arms around my knees. I'd been scared pretty steadily for the past two days. I'd been terrified out of my head for at least a few moments of each. But now, that cool familiar mind-voice telling me things I didn't want to hear, no matter how vague… I was as trapped and mindlessly afraid as a fox in a hunter's cage.

I jumped when James suddenly appeared at my window, forearm braced against the glass as he leaned down and fiddled with the door handle. When he pulled the door open, I catalogued his every movement, trying desperately to distract myself from the insidious thoughts that wouldn't quite be silenced. He eyed me suspiciously as I watched him like a deer in headlights, probably confused by my seeming mood swings. After all, I'd gone from annoyed to half-teasing to stony silence to, now, little-girl-in-a-thunderstorm.

"Get out," he said, when it became apparent that I wasn't moving. Slowly, I unfolded my legs and straightened out of the car. James shut my door behind me when I did not, and when he took my elbow to lead me into the inn, he was frowning. "What's wrong with you?"

"I'm fine," I said numbly, letting him pull me forward. "Aside from the whole kidnapped-by-a-psychopath thing."

"These things happen," he said, and caught me neatly as I tripped on the single step leading to the inn entrance. As soon as I was steadied, I pulled my arm away from his hand. He let me do it, barely even glancing down, apparently having taken my answer at face value. I kept pace with him, automatically matching our strides, and was vaguely relieved when he didn't try to grab me again.

Our room was at the end of a long hallway, on the second of three floors. I entered in front of James, not watching him lock the door behind us.

There was only one bed.

This, for some reason, surprised me not at all. I registered it with the tired resignation of a mother coming home to find her toddler has thrown food across the kitchen again. Of course. Fuck. He probably hadn't specified how many people the room was for, and what with my having stayed in the car… I approached the bed and sat down, and then was somehow on my back without really intending on lying down. I hadn't eaten all day, hadn't gotten out of the car in hours upon hours, and now that I'd been presented with a proper mattress, I felt utterly exhausted. What is it about long car rides that does that to your system? It's not like I'd _done_ anything.

James strolled across the room and sat down on the edge of the mattress closest to the television, snagging the remote and turning it on as he did.

"You're hungry," he said, not a question, eyes scanning the television screen as he flipped channels.

"Yes," I concurred, hoping that he'd continue his plan of keeping me alive and relatively healthy.

"Order pizza," James told me, finally settling on the Discovery Channel. A special, I noted with grim amusement, on lions in the wild. I rolled across the bed and reached for the telephone, picking up the little complimentary card that listed numbers of local restaurants. It wasn't even until my hand touched the receiver that the enormity of what I was touching sunk in, immediately and devastatingly followed by the realization that I didn't even know if the Cullens had a phone, let alone their number. And Charlie? I could call my father, my dear, silent, wounded father, and he would… But god, I couldn't even do that, could I? By the time I said hello, James would know, would hear it in my voice, and that would be that.

So I ordered pizza.

And we watched the Discovery Channel.

I stayed at the headboard of the bed, sitting cross-legged, holding a pillow in my lap. James stretched out on his stomach, arms folded to support his chin, sprawled as easily and loosely as the male lions that collapsed, sated, after a kill. Ten minutes into the special there was an extended segment of footage of a hunt, following several lionesses as they loped across a grassy safari and, one by one, attacked a straggling antelope that had drifted from its fleeing herd. I watched the lions hurl themselves through the air to hit the antelope with all their combined weight, claws and teeth sinking into the beast's stomach and neck, rolling in a massive tumble of fur and grass and dirt and blood as the antelope went down beneath them. I shuddered. James tilted his head, stretched his shoulders and torso by lithely twisting from side to side, and sighed. I wondered if he was jealous of the lions.

The pizza arrived about thirty minutes after I'd ordered it. The room phone rang, loud and abrasive, and James asked for one of the few bellhops to carry it up to our door. When he retrieved it from just outside and set it on the mattress, I attacked that pizza with the same ferocity as the lions onscreen. It took me two and a half slices to realize that James was now watching me instead of the television, one feast for another, a slight, bemused smile playing on his lips.

"I've never seen a human eat like that," he commented, reaching down to remove his boots. "You're almost like one of us."

"I'm nothing like you," I said, harsher than I'd really intended, and reached for slice number four. James kicked his second boot against the dresser that the TV sat upon and flopped backwards onto the mattress, landing on his back beside me. I inched away, tilting the box so that the cardboard top flap was between us.

"Careful," James said, one hand drifting up to brush against the back of my bandaged hand, "I might think you don't like me."

"Please don't touch me," I told him, refusing to take my eyes away from the lions. His hand hovered near my shoulder, then slid over to rest on the back of my neck. His thumb smoothed the skin at my clavicle, fitting into the hollow between my throat and my shoulder. He tugged, lightly for him, but it was enough to yank my head sideways and down towards him. I swallowed the piece of crust I'd been chewing on, hand faltering in midair.

"I'm beginning to think," James remarked, as if he weren't gripping me by the throat, "that being nice to you is not the best way to get results. You get _complacent_," he continued, tugging me closer on the word, "and _belligerent_." One more tug and the pizza fell from my hand as my temple hit the mattress, my torso twisting down. In a flash James flipped himself over me, bracing himself with one arm as the other hand circled my throat with long, strong fingers. Behind him, the lions roared. I could feel his knees on either side of my thighs, straddling me. There was a wet ripping sound from the television; something had been torn off something else.

"I'm not belligerent," I said, belligerently, trying to ignore the weight of him. We were almost squashing the pizza box. A useless observation.

"You are," James corrected, and inhaled. "I can smell fear on you, Bella. Why are you so stubborn if you're so afraid?"

"I'm stubborn," I told him, very aware of his hand on my throat and of the fact that he wasn't actually squeezing yet, "_because_ I'm afraid." He chuckled.

"That's good, actually. You'd make a decent vampire."

"By all means," I said, words brave but voice shaky, "turn me so I can kill you."

"I don't think so," he said, mock-thoughtful. "Why do that when I can do this?" And James bent his head and pressed his nose into the hollow where his thumb had been, fingers moving away as he breathed in. "Mmm. Vampires don't smell this good." I begged to differ; Edward always smelled like warmth and candles, and James himself had an oddly pleasant earthy scent. But now was not the time.

"Is that why you're keeping me alive?" I asked, voice small.

"I'm keeping you alive," James told me, dragging his face up my neck and forcing me to tilt my head back accommodatingly, "for a number of reasons."

"Will you just tell me? Clearly?" I was sounding increasingly breathless, for various reasons, and I was sincerely hoping that if I could just get him to keep talking, he'd stop. James bared his teeth in a narrow, vampire grin, his face now inches above my own.

"It'll hurt your boyfriend more," he said, and I felt a shaft of pain at the image of Edward that those words produced. "I'll be less bored, with you to play with," he continued, eyes moving from my brows to my nose to my lips, clearly distracted. "And I'll figure it out."

"Figure what out?" The question was a whisper, barely there. I could feel the rumble of a growl, not angry, just hungry, vibrate through his chest to mine.

"Why you're so damn interesting," he answered, and kissed me.

**NEXT:**

_"What-" I started, and then fell immediately silent as his head whipped towards mine. His eyes were dead black, upper lip curled in an instinctive, ferocious snarl._


	8. Tension

**As always, thanks for the reviews! A particular shout-out goes to Jabberwalk, who not only has a cool screenname, but just gave me perhaps the best compliment I could hope for (heh, regarding both Bella and typos). You know who you are.**

When he'd kissed me in the ballet studio, it had been all cold and frightening and out of my control. I'd been sick with guilt and terror and shame, and James had been humming with triumphant power. This was not that kiss.

I reacted instantly, for one thing. My brain whirred, my two main options flashing faster than fast: resist and make him force a response, or take him by surprise and kiss him back. I chose option number two, following my usual pattern of acting immediately and leaving the uncertainty and the consequences for later.

My hands came up in one smooth motion, for once a little graceful, and I grabbed the back of his head as my own lifted off the mattress to take control of the kiss. James made a noise of surprise, and I felt a delicious burst of satisfaction. Even if it had taken something as drastic and filled with terrible recriminations as a kiss to do it, I had won a round, however small. Then, his tongue was in my mouth and I stopped thinking clearly enough to measure little victories.

The hand on my neck slid around to cup the back of my head, and with a feline sort of purr James worked his other arm around beneath my back and lifted us into a sitting position. He hoisted me up, the hand on my back slipping down to splay just above my tailbone as he pressed me into him. Before I knew it, my legs were around his waist, my knees up beneath his arms. Mission accomplished, James pressed me back down onto the bed and closed his teeth around my lower lip. There was some kind of whimpering sound that kept playing in my ears, and as he broke the kiss and moved his mouth down the side of my throat towards my collarbone I realized it was coming from me. My eyes closed, I tilted my head back and let him tear my shirt down the middle.

I dropped my hands and clenched my fists around the top blanket when his cool, ruthless mouth closed over my left breast.

"Oh, god," I heard, from my lips, no memory of thinking the words long enough to say them, lost inside the flashing insensible fire. I could feel him between my legs, could feel him wanting me, the wicked delightful passion with which his teeth tugged at my nipple. And then his fingers found their way beneath the hem of my jeans and I flung my hands up, digging them into his hair, dragging his head up to mine. I didn't know what I was intending to do; cry, maybe, or beg, or tell him to stop.

Instead of any of those, I just stared as his lips curved, showing teeth.

Then his mouth was on mine again and his fingers were inside me and when he broke the thin skin that had formed over my cut lip I tasted my blood on his tongue.

He shoved me away so roughly that the back of my head bounced off the mattress, disorienting me, my arms around his neck one instant and around empty air the next. I fell back, catching myself on my elbows, still foggy with hazed confusion. James was at the window, his head entirely outside, fingers clamped along the sill with enough force that I could hear the wood creak from all the way across the room. I could hear him taking breaths, too, deep and ragged, like he needed to cleanse his careless lungs.

"What-" I started, and then fell immediately silent as his head whipped towards mine. His eyes were dead black, upper lip curled in an instinctive, ferocious snarl.

"I'm going to get you some more clothes," James said after a long, ugly moment, voice low and controlled. His white face, so recently flushed with my blood, was strained.

And he left.

I sat dumbfounded for a good five minutes after the room door closed behind him, my knees bent, my ruined shirt hanging around my pretty much bare chest. I wasn't sure which had stunned me more, the reality of what had just happened, or the fact that he'd left me alone.

_He'd left me alone_.

I could call Charlie. I could call the police. I could go downstairs, find the desk clerk, and cry kidnap. I could call a _taxi_, for god's sake. James was gone. James was getting me new clothes. James had left the building.

And what did I do?

I took a shower.

I hadn't showered in what, two days? Three? Nor had I changed clothes. And I had a thought that, whether I tried to leave or not, if I didn't take this chance odds were the next time I'd have an opportunity to shower would be with James in the room, fully aware of my forthcoming nudity. And that did not seem like a good idea.

It was only as I was folding my torn shirt in the corner of the bathroom that the full weight of what I'd done—of what I'd let him do—hit me like a battering ram. I stared down at the shirt, at my feeble attempts to make it look normal, and went down on my knees.

I felt sick. I felt scared. I felt completely and utterly alone. Naked except for my underwear, kneeling on the tiled floor of an Iowa inn bathroom, my hurt hand throbbing anew, I felt like dying.

"Shit," I said, almost numb, disgustingly grateful for the fact that I wasn't sobbing. Not only had I kissed him, I'd let him… His hand had been where no man's had; he had touched me where I'd dreamed of letting Edward touch me. And I'd liked it. Liked it? I'd _loved_ it, encouraged it, wanted him to keep going. My body had betrayed me, and I'd welcomed the betrayal with open arms. Worse than that, if such a thing was possible… I hadn't even thought about Edward at all. Not until here. Not until now.

I managed to pull myself into the shower, using the wall to get to my feet and tilting my face up into the hot spray. Water plastered my hair to my skull, my neck, my upper back, and I closed my eyes and waited for the pounding stream to wash me away.

"He's a monster," I told myself aloud, one-handedly scrubbing my skin with the inn's complimentary bar of soap as I held the other carefully out of the spray. "He kills people for fun. He wants to kill you." But I couldn't forget the way he'd kissed me, the force with which he'd pushed me away when my blood hit his lips, the careful bandage job he'd done on my hand. "He's keeping you alive to toy with you, Bella," I went on, starting with the shampoo. "He's a sadistic, evil murderer." (He'd joked about dance moves.) "Also, you love Edward and he's going to find you and there's some reason why he hasn't already." (He'd bought me pizza and juice.)

There was one thing, though, that I couldn't just talk myself away from. There was the fact that, whatever mental turmoil I was going through… I didn't feel unclean. I didn't feel tainted by James's hands, by his mouth. And that was something of a mixed blessing.

_Of course I don't_, I thought, massaging conditioner through my hair to give my hand something to do. _He's good at it. He's sexy. All right, there, I said it. There's nothing to feel guilty about if you ignore all the other horrible stuff about him._ Which, all things considered, didn't really help me.

And then there was a second thing, equally unavoidable. There was Edward.

Thinking about him hurt. It made me feel guilty, and ashamed, and sad… but there was something different about the sadness. It wasn't as immediate, as gutwrenching. It was almost… almost _wistful_, like he was something I'd already—

Already moved beyond.

Unable to consider the ramifications of something like that, I turned off the water and stepped out of the shower basin. There were two plushy towels folded on a little stool near the sink, and I picked one up and dried off with a wry recollection of the last time I'd handled a towel. No rack to rip out of the wall today. And then, dry and clean, my next major problem presented itself.

I had no clothes.

I'd planned on just putting on my old ones again and maybe tying my shirt closed, but now that I was all fresh and faintly orange-scented, I found that I couldn't quite bring myself to put my sweaty, bloodstained, two-day-old outfit back on. I stood in the bathroom in front of the fogged mirror, towel wrapped around me, and nearly growled with frustration. What was I supposed to do now? Going downstairs and calling a cab was out. Not like this. Also, I was going to need to change this bandage soon. It was damp, though I'd done my best to keep it dry, and there was a faint reddish stain directly over the cut. Fantastic.

Slowly, I left the bathroom and went to check the actual room. Had James left anything in here that I could use? Or was it all in the car? My eyes fell first on the rumpled bed and the pizza box, which made me blush. Then I caught sight of the desk chair, a straight-backed wooden affair… and the jacket draped over it. I hadn't even noticed him taking the coat off, but evidently he hadn't bothered to put it back on when he left. I crossed the room in a hurry, wounded arm clutched around my breasts to keep the towel up, the other rifling through the pockets of James's beaten, brown leather coat. I found some loose change, an unexpected pack of sour gum, a worryingly brownish-red stained napkin. That was disgusting, and I threw it away before continuing through the inside pockets. Nothing but a few folded pieces of paper. Any wallet he owned was with him now, along with whatever he'd used to wrap my hand.

"Damn," I muttered, and then unfolded the pieces of paper before I could tell myself to stop. One was just a list of random directions, scribbled hastily in pencil. The other was more confusing, a torn piece of what could almost be real letter-writing paper. I frowned at it, smoothing out the half-crumpled sheet with my thumb as I studied the words printed more carefully in faded black ink.

_"And the inexorable Heaven, _

_and the deaf tyranny of Fate, _

_the ruling principle of Hate, _

_which for its pleasure doth create_

_the things it may annihilate, _

_refused thee even the boon to die: _

_the wretched gift eternity."_

- _Lord Byron, 'Prometheus'_

A poem fragment. A poem? Lord _Byron_? I knew Lord Byron; we'd read him in school. 19th century Romantic poet, supposedly a real lothario. And James had a piece of his poetry folded up in his pocket. My eyes scanned the words again, this time pausing to take in their meaning. Not that it was hard. The verse referred to the Greek myth about Prometheus, the man who stole fire from the gods and was punished for…

For eternity.

I blinked at the paper in my hand, not for the first time taken completely aback. James did not strike me as the poetic type. Surely not. This had to be someone else's; Victoria's, maybe? Not that she'd struck me as any more sensitive than he had, but… And if it was his, was that what he thought? That his immortality, the thing he coveted as so superior to all things human, was a curse? A punishment? That couldn't be true. If it was, he was the best actor I'd ever seen, and I'd once met Michael J. Fox at a university presentation in Phoenix.

More confused than ever, I refolded the papers and stuck them back where I'd found them. Then, I tucked one corner of my towel beneath the wrap, tunic-style, and rubbed my hands up and down the tops of my arms. It was kind of cold in the room without clothes on, especially with my damp hair still plastered down my back. I looked at the bed, but then thought twice about getting under the covers naked. I could get a blanket, but that would have virtually the same effect. Slowly, with a mix of reluctance and an odd anticipation, I turned back to James's jacket.

I pulled it on over the towel, enjoying the soft warmth of the coat's inner lining. It had that broken-in, old sort of feel, the leather as soft as butter. It was thick, too, and had a good, solid heaviness to it. I felt warmer almost instantly, and zipped up the jacket for good measure. Now, I felt slightly less awkward, and could pretend to myself that the towel was actually a skirt. With the weight of the jacket over it, it was much less likely to fall off.

Feeling better all around, I went to sit on the end of the mattress and picked up the remote. It wasn't until after I'd flipped from the Discovery Channel to the Westley-Inigo swordfight of The Princess Bride that it occurred to me that I wasn't calling for help. I hadn't even picked up the phone. In fact, my one line of reasoning for not going downstairs to alert someone, anyone, to my situation… was that I was _embarrassed about being seen in just a towel._

"Unbelievable," I muttered, as Westley knocked Inigo upside the head with his sword hilt. The sly little inner voice that took so much pleasure in pointing out all the things wrong with me was laughing. _Stockholm, thy face is Bella's._ I crossed my arms, absently smoothing one hand along the arm of the jacket, and inhaled the woodsy scent that seemed to imbue everything James touched. It wasn't overpowering, and didn't even seem especially dirty; it was like being in a forest glen at dawn: dewy, wild, and warm.

I sighed.

"I hate my life," I announced to Fezzik, who mainly just looked confused. _You and me both._


	9. Dominance

**Ok, so there've been over 1,000 hits at this point; can we get to 100 reviews? I know we'll hit that eventually, as I've got enough chapters to go with the current amount of reviews per chapter, but it'd be awesome if you guys really stepped up and got there sooner than I expect.... Hint hint.... Thanks to the wonderful folks who keep letting me know they're reading :)**

The door to the room swung open just as Buttercup was exchanging her freedom for Westley's life, and I jerked out of my slumped position on the bed as James walked in. He was carrying two plastic bags, and his eyes were reddish-brown. Normal. For him.

"Here," he said, tossing me one bag and dropping the other by the TV. His eyes were not on my face, and after a moment I realized that he was staring at his jacket on my torso. I plucked at it automatically, clearing my throat.

"I, um," I said, embarrassed. "It was cold."

"You're still here," he said, not sounding _surprised_, exactly, but just sort of… I couldn't name it. I opened my mouth, but what explanation could I possibly give?

_"Yeah, I mean, I almost had sex with you and it turned out that I really kind of enjoyed it, so I didn't want to leave just yet." _

_"Oh, you know, you're not so bad for a psycho bloodsucker, and I'm having this complete and total mental breakdown at the moment, so…"_

"I didn't have any clothes," is what I ended up saying, because _that_ was a good answer. "And my hand…" I trailed off, wondering if it would be bad to say it was bleeding through the bandage. Which it wasn't, exactly, but the thought remained. James dropped his gaze to my wrapped palm.

"Get dressed," he said, nostrils flaring. His eyes snapped up with the breath, once again fixing somewhere around my collarbone. His coat. My skin. For the first time, I realized that maybe mixing our scents like this wasn't the best of plans. I got up fast, taking the bag, and promptly sat back down. Head rush. James cocked his head at me, gaze hungry but not coming any closer, and I ignored the continued burn of embarrassment as I got up again and managed not to trip on my rushed way to the bathroom.

Once the door was shut, I leaned against it and let out a breath. Shit. That was awkward. That was weird. That was… not actually frightening. Intimidating and confusing and strange, but… he hadn't actually _scared_ me in those moments. I couldn't decide if that was good or bad.

The clothes James had bought (or, I presumed he'd bought them; they were in a plastic bag…) were simple. A pair of sweatpants, black, made for a woman two inches taller than me. I rolled the waistband a few times, feeling frumpy. The shirt, once I unfolded it, turned out to be two shirts. A tight gray one with long sleeves, and a green t-shirt with a picture of a globe on the chest. I shrugged out of James's jacket and put it on the sink, pulling on both shirts. I had no bra, but my chest was small enough for it not to be too obvious. In fact, as I inspected my reflection, the two shirts actually looked… kind of good. The green contrasted well with my fair skin and dark hair. I rolled my eyes and picked up the jacket.

James was sitting on the edge of the mattress, resting his elbows on his knees, watching The Princess Bride. Outside, through the window, it was dark. I glanced at the electric alarm clock on the bedside table. 10:23 PM. He didn't look up when I quietly closed the bathroom door behind me, but held out a hand. Swallowing, I gave him the jacket. Soundlessly, James lifted it to his face and breathed in deeply.

"Hm," he said, tossing it onto the desk beside the TV. "Do they fit?"

"The clothes?" He turned, finally, and looked at me. _Yes_, that look said. _You idiot._ I looked down, right hand awkwardly smoothing over my stomach.

"Yeah. I mean, the pants are a little big, but…" He had already turned back to Westley in the Zoo of Death. Well. That was new. I'd seen him furious with me, lustful, hungry, amused, contemptuous, deadly… but he'd yet to actually _ignore _me. Annoyed, and even more annoyed by my annoyance, I sat down at the headboard and drew my knees up to my chest. James stood, reaching for the second bag he'd brought back with him. He entered the bathroom without a word, and came back in a new pair of jeans and a black shirt unbuttoned over a white athlete's undershirt. We sat in silence for a while, and then I couldn't take it anymore.

"So did you have a good time?" I asked, strained, trying very hard not to sound put out. "You know, not being here?" James twisted around and looked at me.

"You're upset?" he asked, incredulous. "Would you rather not have a throat?" And I exploded.

"No, I wouldn't rather _not have a throat_, I'd just, I don't know, like to be treated like a _person_ instead of your little sex toy! You can't just do _that_ and then leave without a word and come back and not even mention it and expect me to be just _fine_, damn it!" He hit me. One moment he was at the end of the bed, watching me yell, and the next he'd cuffed me in the cheek. I toppled sideways, catching myself on my elbow, and stared at him.

"I can do whatever I want, little girl," he snapped, standing over me beside the bed. "To you, with you, whatever!"

"I think that's pretty obvious," I snapped right back, reckless, the sexual frustration and the anger and my torn mental state combusting in the face of his arrogance. "But that's the last time it's easy!" He laughed darkly, reaching down to fling the half-empty pizza box onto the floor on the other side of the bed. With it out of the way, James leaned over and grabbed me by the shoulders, lifting me clear off the mattress.

"Oh, it'll be easy," he promised, turning to shove me against the room wall. "You wanted me then, and you want me now. You think I don't know? You think I can't tell?"

"You bastard," I hissed, fists clenched at my side. My cut palm stung sharply. I ignored it. "Don't you dare."

"Are you threatening me?" he asked, sneering, and I glared.

"If you even try it, I'll bite off your tongue." James laughed out loud, angry, delighted, I couldn't tell which. He tilted his face towards mine and I snapped at him, my teeth clicking together inches away from his mouth. He did it again, eyes darkening, and this time I nearly got his lower lip. Fury and desire warred within me, raging atop embarrassment and fear, insecurity and pain. The third time James moved, his mouth caught mine in a hard kiss that I responded to like the alternative was death. Where Edward had flung himself away seconds after a kiss like this, James pulled me closer. I could feel the vibrations in the air as his bloodlust rose, knew that he was being just as reckless as I, sensed the struggle for control that simmered beneath his cool, smooth skin.

When we broke the kiss, neither of us tried to take it further. We simply stood, inches apart, his arms around my waist and my hands clamped around his elbows. I was panting.

"This," he said, "is harder than I thought."

"What?" I asked, aware of nothing but his eyes on mine. "Not killing me?" He didn't answer, and after a moment let me go.

"Go to sleep," James ordered, suddenly across the room by the desk. "We're moving in the morning." I walked to the bed, wondering if he'd allow me to sleep in the bathroom. Doubtful. Slowly, trying not to think about what had just happened, my hand and the stinging bruise that was probably appearing on my face forgotten, I crawled under the covers. The television cut off, and a second later the lights did as well. I turned on my side, curling up as close to the edge of the bed as possible, and tried to close my eyes.

It was about fifteen minutes before James settled onto the bed beside me, not collapsing like before, but just lowering himself down. Vampires, I knew, didn't actually sleep, but could they rest? Edward hadn't really been clear on that. Maybe they just went into a sort of zen state, all systems off. Or maybe James would lie on his back all night, staring at the ceiling. For both our sakes, I hoped for the former.

It was hard going, trying to get myself to go to bed with him right next to me. We weren't touching, but I could feel his presence invading my personal bubble, could feel his weight shifting on the mattress. It wasn't until he stopped moving that I made myself relax, and after a long, long stillness, I finally did fall asleep.


	10. Shatter

**-Thanks for the reviews, guys! :) I seriously love you all.- **

**A/N: It starts to get a little darker now, but keep in mind that any relationship between James and Bella that is loyal to who they are is going to be dark, it's going to be twisted, but it's going to be oh-so-satisfying. So just stay with me; I swear I won't leave you with the lights out. **

**Oh, and Vans-- James's POV is coming up in the next chapter, so don't give up on him yet!**

I had the idea that maybe, sometime during that night, I rolled over and reached out an arm and laid it over James's stomach. That I might have, at one point, exchanged my pillow for his chest. I don't know, though, if that was real or imagined. When I woke, I woke alone.

I sat up, good hand rubbing the sleep-grit from my eyes. There was light coming through the window to my right, soft and golden and forgiving. I checked the clock on my other side, seeing no sign of my captor-lover-killer. It was just past eight, and I felt better rested than I had in a long time. As I swung my legs over the right edge of the bed to retrieve a piece of cold, uneaten pizza from the box on the floor, the bathroom door creaked behind me.

James paused in the doorframe and tugged his blond hair, water-darkened to a deep brownish-gold, into the customary ponytail. He was shirtless, the jeans he'd come back with the night before slung low on his narrow hips. I couldn't help myself. I stared.

James with a shirt on was good. James without a shirt on was better. His chest was lean, the muscles close beneath his skin. His stomach was taut, a thin line of tawny hair tracing down to disappear in the waistband of his jeans, the dark crystal he wore on a leather thong around his neck his one ornamentation. He watched me watching him, arms falling to his sides.

"Keep looking at me like that and I'll have to bite you," he warned me, a thread of genuine darkness weaving through the careless humor.

"You're going to kill me anyway," I replied, half-breathless. "At least I'd go out smiling." _Oh, my god. Did you just say that, Bella Swan? Did you just blatantly flirt with him?_ James chuckled, shaking his head.

"No," he said. "You wouldn't." I coughed, the moment made strange, and dropped my eyes. James reached behind him into the bathroom and grabbed the undershirt, pulling it over his head and smoothing his hands over his hair. I got up, reached for that slice of pizza, and considered how long it had been since I'd brushed my teeth.

"You know," I said before I thought twice, "I need a toothbrush."

"A toothbrush," he repeated. I glanced at him across the bed, and nodded.

"Don't you?" One corner of his mouth went up.

"No. Bacteria don't grow on me. And I don't eat your food. The most we need is water, to rinse out the blood." I could feel my face scrunching in distaste, which James seemed to find funny. "All right," he said, drawing out the words as if this was all utterly ridiculous, "I'll get you a toothbrush." I flushed.

"Well, if you're going to keep this kidnapping thing up…" I trailed off, feeling stupid, and then feeling mad for feeling stupid. It was a perfectly legitimate point, my needing a toothbrush. He'd threatened me, hurt me, almost killed me, seduced me and refused to let me go. The least he could do was get me a goddamn toothbrush.

"Do you want real breakfast, or is room temperature, ten-hour-old pizza enough for you?" He was patronizing now, moving across the room to shrug into the black button-up he'd left over the back of the desk chair. I dropped the slice of pizza back into the box and stalked towards the bathroom.

"If you'll deign to buy me breakfast, I will eat it." He snorted.

"I was right. Being nice to you turns you into a bitch. _Humans_." He still didn't sound anything but amused, so I risked a second retort.

"'Being nice to me'? You hit me."

"Oh, Bella," James said, turning his head to look at me over his shoulder as he shook out his jacket, "I _tapped _you. If I'd _hit_ you, your neck would be broken."

Oh. Well, that was comforting.

In the bathroom, I didn't bother shutting the door. Then, I saw my reflection and reconsidered. My hair was tousled and tangled, which I didn't particularly mind. It was my face that was the problem.

The place on my left cheek, where he'd "tapped" me the night before, was not as livid as it had probably been immediately after. Instead, there was a deep purple smear, high on my cheekbone, just beneath my left eye. The discoloration took up a good section of my cheek, and I had to consider myself lucky I didn't have a black eye.

"You asshole," I whispered, leaning closer to the mirror and gingerly touching the bruise. It stung, ugly and inescapable, at the slightest brush of my fingertips. Angry, helpless tears pricked my eyes, and I blinked them viciously away. I turned on the sink and splashed my face with cold water, gasping at the shock. It felt good, though, on the hot, tight skin of my cheek. I used the little bar of hand soap on the counter by the basin to wash my face, drying it with the small folded towel at the corner of the sink. Then I tucked my hair behind my ears, taming it as much as I could by smoothing it with my hands, and walked stiffly out of the bathroom.

"We're leaving now," James told me unnecessarily, having dumped the pizza box and its sad contents into the miniature trashcan under the desk. The box didn't quite fit, one corner jutting out of the trashcan like a little cardboard iceberg. I said nothing, anger pulsing through me. I couldn't believe I'd let him joke about it, couldn't believe I'd kissed him after he'd hit me, couldn't believe I'd _flirted_ with him. I wasn't sure whom I was more disgusted with: James, or myself. Probably myself. At least he had a reason for being a sadistic, abusive bastard. What the fuck was my excuse?

As I walked past him out the door, James snagged me by the waist. He pulled me back to walk beside him, my hip snug against his, but this time I crossed my arms tightly below my breasts instead of playing along. James growled, low in his chest, and I welcomed it. _Thank you_, I thought savagely, _for being a monster. _It was easier, easier to ignore anything and everything that had spun together to create this awful, confusing web I was caught in, when he was the animal.

"Either kill me or don't," I said lowly, "but _don't_ you snarl at me." I felt the tears rising again, and forced them back. His grip on my waist was almost painful.

"And what," he said, lowering his head so that the words stung against my ear as we approached the elevator, "brought this on?" I stopped, and so did he. I think he didn't expect it, or else he'd probably have just dragged me along.

"Did you miss my _face_?" I asked, twisting to confront him. He smirked.

"I like it. Makes you look fragile. Well. More fragile."

"I," I hissed, wishing to god I could hurt him back, "am not a doll! You don't get to hurt me because you think it's _cute_! My face is not your coloring book!"

"You know," James said with a mock-sigh, starting to walk and, as I'd expected, dragging me along, "I find it kind of interesting that you think you can say that and it'll actually change things." His tone, starting out contemplative and thoughtful, ended hard. "I'm a vampire, remember? A _real_ one, not like your precious little boyfriend. If you think I'll feel bad about hurting you, you're more stupid than I thought." He jabbed the elevator button viciously, fingers biting into my hip.

"I know that," I snapped, my throat closing on the words. The elevator door opened, and James yanked me into the car. "What do you _want_ from me, then? Why do you—why are you nice to me at all, if _that's_ what you think?" He was right. I _was_ stupider than he'd thought, stupider than _I'd_ thought. I was a fool for thinking there was anything between us. I was a moron for being conflicted about whatever screwed up emotions I may or may not have had in regards to James. And above all, I was a complete and total idiot for thinking, even for a second, that he was anything but a cold killer.

When my next breath was a shuddering sob, I wanted to scream.

"Because it's a laugh," he said cruelly, slamming a fist against the STOP button on the elevator panel and cornering me against the junction of two walls. "Because it's entertainment." I barked a laugh, barely resisting the urge to spit in his face, but only barely. I almost _wanted_ to infuriate him further, almost _wanted_ him to lose control.

"Oh, does it get boring, being immortal? You poor thing." I raised a hand, not really sure what I was going to do with it, and he caught both my wrists and squeezed. I gasped, the tears finally spilling down my cheeks, but my mouth was moving and I couldn't make it stop. "I guess that's the punishment part, right?" I asked, unable to control the near-hysteria. "Lord Byron knows; maybe we should ask him!"

As soon as it was out, I felt my heart skip a beat. Everything in me froze. James's eyes flickered, his head slowly tilting, the panther eying its prey.

"You went through my pockets," he said quietly. I needed, very much, to swallow, but my throat didn't seem to be working properly.

"I'm sorry," I said, the words tripping over each other, and bit back a yelp as his grip tightened to the point of grinding pain.

"Yes," he said, and snapped my left wrist. "You are."

I screamed. James clapped a hand over my mouth, other arm snaking around my waist as my knees crumpled. No pain, not the glass in my hand or his attack on the cut or the time I'd broken a finger in 8th grade, had ever been like this pain. It was so all-consuming and sudden that I almost felt like it wasn't really happening, like I was removed from the fiery snapping knives savaging my arm, and yet even in my distance it was all around me. As my legs folded James clamped me to him, holding me up by his grip on my waist, his other hand muzzling me like a dog.

"Shh," he whispered, almost compassionately, his forearm like a band of iron tight around my lower back. He let go of my mouth, arm wrapping around my shoulders to keep me upright. I was breathing in gasps, in shock, my right hand resting on his shoulder as my left hovered in the air. I couldn't even feel the cut anymore, only the immediate, splintery pain of my broken wrist.

"Oh, fuck," I managed, my voice a harsh sort of sob, unable to believe that he'd done it. That this had happened to me. That I was here, pressed painfully against him in a stopped elevator car, my left arm screaming. James hesitated, black eyes wild or gentle or mad, and then kissed me. His mouth broke through the shards of pain slicing through my head, and when I tasted his lips it was through a glaze of tears.

He broke the kiss and scooped me up bridal style, ignoring my low cry of pain as the movement jostled my wrist.

"I'll fix it," he promised, twisting his hand to unjam the elevator. "Don't worry, I'll fix it." I couldn't talk, rendered mute by pain and fear and an unnamed aching wrench at the awful, confused tenderness in that quiet voice. I could only give in and rest my head against his shoulder, focusing only on breathing evenly as he carried me out of the elevator. "We're checking out," James called to the woman behind the counter, shouldered the lobby door open, and left.


	11. Torn

**Yay, we reached 100! Keep 'em coming, wonderful people! **

**In answer to a couple confused people-- THERE IS A REASON why Edward and co. have not shown up! Firstly because I don't like them very much (except for Alice) and secondly because of an actual plot point that will be revealed in few chapters.**

He didn't see it coming. The pain. He expected her anger, the brittle sound of her voice as she hissed at him about her bruised face; he expected the wash of humor it sent through him. The sight of this girl, this slender, short human girl, threatening _him_. Warning _him_ off.

What he didn't expect was the flash, hot and cold all at once, of actual physical _pain_ that lanced through his chest when he broke her wrist. Well. Not when he broke it, exactly, but when she screamed. When her body convulsed in his arms, big dark eyes wide and shocked and somehow _betrayed_, staring at him like she hadn't actually thought… Like she had forgotten what he _was_, what he _did_, and…

James glanced at her in the seat beside him, sitting crumpled against the window, snapped wrist up against her chest. She wasn't looking at him. She wasn't making sounds anymore, at least, or spasming; now it was reduced to a slight trembling that was only really noticeable in the hands. The tears had dried salty on her cheeks, her eyes reddish. Like his own, almost. He frowned. This wasn't right.

There had been no pleasure, see. No burst of satisfaction at the snapping sound, no excitement at the muffled scream. There had only been grim awareness, the knowledge that this thing had happened and that he had done it, followed almost immediately by an odd sort of queasiness. Not guilt, surely, not regret, nothing so concise or simple… but it was there all the same, churning in his gut, and when he picked her up and felt her shivering against his chest, the taste of her cold, tearstreaked lips still lingering on his tongue, James found himself wanting to hush her, to calm her. To comfort her?

A low growl rumbling in his chest, he pulled into the parking lot of a CVS in the small Iowa town closest to the inn they'd stayed at.

"Stay here," he told Bella, and went inside. The girl at the desk flirted with him when he bought the wrist splint and bottle of painkillers, or tried to. He ignored her, mind on other things. Such as the troubling memory of the girl—of Bella—clutching at him in her sleep, mumbling to herself, mumbling things that were not what he'd expected. Things like his name. Such as the hot, startlingly passionate way she'd kissed him, the equally startling inner tug her soft moans had awakened in him. And the alarmingly intoxicating scent of her skin, freshly bathed, mingling with his own earthy smell; while her scent wasn't the most fascinating or enticingly perfumed he'd ever encountered, something about the utter _normalcy_ of it made it all the more potent. And the way she'd looked at him after he'd left and come back, the hurt she'd tried and failed to hide; she _hadn't_ liked that he had left. And she had still been there when he'd returned. Which was all vaguely mind-blowing.

Because while his hunt seemed to be going well, the game playing out just as he'd hoped… it was having some unintended side effects. Side effects he'd meant to quell this morning, to quash down before they had a chance to become even more pronounced, first by explaining to her just exactly how far he was from her perfect faux-human boy toy and then by breaking her oh-so-delicate wrist after she'd had the audacity to… to what? To put her hand into the pocket of his jacket while trying it on and then reading the piece of paper she found there? For bringing up thoughts of something he would rather forget? (And wasn't _that_ special, all things considered?) He resisted the urge to snarl, hating the fact that there was a human present. He wasn't good at hiding what he was; had no use for acting. But even now, even _now_ it was happening. He was doubting himself, something he hated even more than playing human.

_She's nothing_, he reminded himself. _A game, a piece of temporary entertainment. A toy. _And still, he couldn't help but feel as though something had gone, was still going, terribly wrong. Unwillingly shaken, he returned to the stolen Taurus and, after doping her with several of the highest-strength OTC painkillers the CVS pharmacy sold, splinted her left wrist.

***********

Drugs, I decided, as the several thousand milligrams of extra-strength Tylenol James had given me started to take effect, were great. Really, really great. In fact, as I closed my eyes and let him adjust my brand new tan splint, I found that I was able to focus on something other than the fact that my _wrist was broken_. For instance, as he finished with the splint, the soft brush of his hand across my face tucking my hair behind my ear. My heart lurched at the gentle touch, despite my every order to remain immune. I opened my eyes and glared at him.

"If I say something stupid and insulting will you break my other arm? Like, 'Please don't touch me like you didn't just snap my wrist'?" Why did I say that? Why was I pushing him? Was it not enough that I'd proved to myself he was a monster, a heartless, soulless asshole who cared less about me than he did about his own personal entertainment? James just looked at me, though, red eyes glinting. "I don't understand," I said then, not realizing I was going to speak until the words were in the air. The bitterness was out of my voice, replaced by a pitiful, pained confusion. "Why are you doing this to me?" Maybe I thought if I just asked the question over and over again, I'd get a different answer.

Again, though, he said nothing. James just shrugged out of his coat and laid it across my lap, almost gruff in this small, inexplicable kindness. Looking down at it as he pulled out of the CVS parking lot and onto the road that led towards the interstate, I felt like crying. Instead, I ran my good fingers over the pockets on the front of his jacket. For the first time, I noticed the small collection of rings looped through one zipper. I touched them, slipping my fingers around the cold metal bands. One of them looked to be a wedding ring.

"What are these from?" I asked quietly, studying the rings. James didn't answer for a long moment, and I glanced up at him. Was this the new pattern? The silent treatment? Then, he cleared his throat and spoke.

"I don't know." I frowned.

"They're not yours?"

"I don't know where they're from," he repeated, a funny emphasis on the words.

"Were they on it when you got it?" I wondered if I should stop asking, but the fact that he was finally answering my questions (no matter how pointless) was too much to pass up. James grimaced.

"It's from… before," he told me shortly. My lips parted in surprise.

"This was yours when you were alive," I clarified, voice very soft. I felt like speaking loudly would break the spell I hadn't even noticed descending. James nodded.

"The rings were on it when I—came back. The buttons, too." I glanced at the other pocket, on my right thigh, and touched the pins there. "I don't… remember what they are," he said, slowly. "Why I put them there." There was a kind of pain in his voice, so subtle I nearly missed it altogether. And finally, I understood.

"Oh." My chest ached, and I knew a different kind of tragedy. _It must be horrible_, I thought, _not to know. Not to remember._ I touched the rings again, lingering on the wedding band, and tried to feel an essence, a ghost. There was nothing. Just metal and stone, whatever echoes of the lives they'd once seen locked away too deep to reach. James was looking straight ahead, profile as smooth as a Greek statue's. I wondered if he'd ever run his fingers over these cold, silent rings, or played with the pins arranged on the breast pocket, looking for the same things. I wondered what it felt like to lose your past so completely, to have such a thing as intimate as your memory wiped clean in a spray of blood and death. And he still wore the jacket now, so many decades later, the rings and buttons still in place. I thought of the poem in the pocket. Was it from before, too? Had he just kept copying it as the years passed, maintaining the verse like he maintained the coat itself, just in case the memory came back to claim it? Or was that from immediately after the change, when there must have been nothing but pain and confusion and hate?

For the first time, I wondered who had turned James into what he was. I knew about Edward, about the rest of the Cullen clan; they'd had Carlisle to guide them, to love them, to bring them out of the shadows of death and into the twilight of immortality. How had it happened for James?

We drove in silence, my head spinning. Too many conflicting emotions were bombarding me at once, despite the effects of the Tylenol that should have numbed me into a sort of stupor. Fury at his actions. Fear of him. Self-disgust for my own responses to him. Sorrow for the past he'd lost forever, and the useless reminders of that loss he had carried since his death. Fragile happiness that he'd told me. Betrayal. Uncertainty. Pain.

I rolled down my window with my good hand, and let the wind whip me away.

**A/N: James's jacket, in the movie, does actually have rings and pins on it. They're probably supposed to be trophies, from people he's killed, but I used them differently. Call it artistic license.**


	12. Choice

**Two more chapters to go! Thanks for the reviews :)**

"Does it hurt?" The question caught me by surprise, and I blinked myself out of my half-sleep. We were stopped in traffic somewhere on I-90, a few hours out of Iowa, and I'd been dozing. I looked at James, who was staring at my splinted wrist with an odd little frown.

"Yes," I said, drawing it out in confusion. "It's… broken…"

"There's more pills in the bottle."

"I know." I didn't know what to make of this. He didn't sound repentant, or even particularly apologetic, just… sort of bemused.

"Take some." I did, narrowing my eyes at him in suspicion.

"I don't get you at all," I told him, and he snorted. For some reason that was funny.

"I might have to kill you sooner than I planned," he replied, and if my eyes hadn't happened to drop to his hands, clenched painfully tight around the wheel, I would have thought he was completely blasé on the subject. Somehow, the sight of those clenched fingers only made the squeeze in my stomach more sickening. If he wasn't fine with wanting me dead—it made it worse, not better. It made it impossible, once again, to tell myself to hate him.

"Oh, okay," I said, feeling surreal. This was insane. This whole thing was just… insane. "Why the change in plans?" He glanced at me.

"Unexpected complications."

"You're crazy," I said quietly, looking straight ahead.

"Hm. Probably."

"Care to name the complications? As long as you're eating me anyway?" I sounded far too calm for the words, and wondered how far away the hysteria waited. I didn't expect an answer, but James gave a short, displeased laugh.

"I'm losing my edge," he said, and I stared at him.

"You just broke my wrist for looking in your pocket."

"And it wasn't fun," he snapped, the irritation evident now, and my eyes fell once more to his bloodless knuckles around the poor strangled steering wheel. The admission sank in, and I blinked. What did _that_ mean? "And then you kept making all those noises, and I didn't _like_ it."

Oh, my god. Was he honestly bitching about that? Was he actually angry with me because _he_ hadn't enjoyed causing _me_ intense pain?

"Well, sorry," I said sarcastically. "I didn't mean to mess things up for you by freaking out at my broken wrist." He let out a short, harsh sigh.

"None of this would have happened if your boyfriend had just been _normal_," he said, and I frowned.

"None of this would have happened if _you_ had just left me alone," I corrected.

"It's not right," James began sharply almost as soon as my last word left my lips, "you and him. It's ridiculous. Humans and vampires don't _live_ together, they _hunt_ each other. We kill you."

"Edward's different. And we never lived together."

"Yet. Come on," he said bitingly, lip curling, "how long do you think it would take for him to steal you away? You think you can keep living your human life and love a vampire?"

"I guess it doesn't matter now, does it?" I responded, drawing up my knees. I sighed. "And I don't think it would have been like that. Not anymore." He paused. We inched forward, the line of cars snaking into the distance.

"What do you mean?" I shrugged, on dangerous ground, eyes on the glove compartment. James snickered darkly. "Trouble in paradise? Not so keen on the neutered vamp anymore?" I sneered at him, tired.

"You wouldn't understand." _Because I don't understand. Because I don't know what's going on. Because I might hate you more than anyone I've ever met. Because I'm sick, deranged, mentally ill. Because I might be in love with you._

"I should just drain you now," he said, tapping the wheel with one palm, chin lowered, not looking at me, intense and distracted all at once. I felt it all spinning, quickening.

"Why don't you?" I asked wildly, wanting to lean over and grab him and just press my hands against his face until something was clear. "Why don't you, then?" And James curled his upper lip in an impatient snarl, yanking the wheel to his right to jerk us into the exit lane. Someone honked. We left the congealing traffic on the interstate, pulling off the exit road at the first intersection that appeared. I was breathing hard, eyes darting from one side of the road ahead to the other, my heart hammering. My brain wouldn't shut up, wouldn't stop repeating that one awful damning thought: _I might be in love with you. Might be in love with you. Might be in love with you._ A hideous echo, it battered at the insides of my skull and hummed like one thousand wasps as James spun the wheel in a reckless, too-sharp turn and parked us in a small, blocked-off byroad ensconced in reddening trees.

As soon as the vehicle stopped, he unsnapped his seatbelt and swung around in the seat to face me.

"Do you want to die?" he asked, intent, voice low, eyes on mine. I gaped at him, disbelieving.

"Of course I don't want-" With that eerie vampire flicker, he went from resting his hands on the wheel to gripping me by the shoulders.

"_Listen to me_," James interrupted, eyes dark, violence swarming all around him. "If you had a choice. This, more of this, or death. What would you choose?" My mouth was still open. I tried to close it, tried to swallow, tried to speak. Nothing.

His hands on my shoulders. My throbbing wrist. The cut on my palm. His eyes, deep and old and wild, wanting something I couldn't name. The question, keeping us here, caught in time.

"I would rather you killed me," I said at last, the words a revelation as much to me as to him. "I'd rather be dead than…"

"Than what?" His face was so near to mine, the darkness so close in him. I shook my head and shuddered, cold.

"You've won," I said, finally understanding this truth. "This is what you wanted all along, isn't it?" I laughed, shattered, ugly. "You win, James. You win. He's lost me." The words hurt coming out, like spiteful shards of ice. "I want you, and I hate you, and I love you, and it's killing me already so please won't you just finish it?"

James closed his eyes, inhaling. He let it out slowly, controlled, eyes snapping open black. His left hand slid across the top of my shoulder to cup my neck, tilting it, fingers tangling in my hair. I leaned my head sideways, following his lead, baring my throat to him. I couldn't close my eyes. I couldn't breathe. His hand on me felt warm, but that was impossible. Just my own throbbing human body heat spreading to his fingers. He bent his head, the leather seat creaking, lips brushing against the bluish line of my jugular. When I felt the heartbreakingly tentative scrape of his teeth, not quite hard enough to hurt, my chest flooded with a sharp, bitter relief. The scrape became a pinch, not yet breaking skin, and I braced myself for dark.

The car door behind me opened with a smash, half-wrenched off, and something like cold steel clamped around my upper arm and tore me from the seat. I hit the ground hard, skidding on my back, my teeth clacking shut on my tongue to send a jolt of sweet copper pain through my mouth. I saw James, out of the car and down in a savage half-crouch, hands clawed and teeth bared in threat. The violence that had simmered in the car between us exploded into a rumble of low, stomach-twisting growls. I saw someone else rushing at me, moving too quickly for my eyes to follow, and then something slammed against my temple and everything went bright and blind.


	13. Hunger

I didn't actually black out, despite the blow to the head. Honestly, I think the jarring pain that shot up my ravaged left arm upon impact after being thrown was enough to keep me conscious no matter how hard the kick to my temple. That's what it was, I realized, after the dizzy, sickening few seconds of seeing stars. Whoever had yanked me out of the car had slammed a foot into my temple hard enough to knock me on my side. When I could see straight, I rolled as quietly as I could to my other side so I could see what was happening, eyes wide and terrified. Had Edward come for me? Had he heard what I'd said to James, and gone into a rage?

James was still in his hunter-crouch, poised to pounce or lunge, face twisted with animal fury. And standing between him and me, hair flipped casually over one shoulder, was Victoria.

I tried to keep my breathing as quiet as possible, though shock made me want to gasp. The redheaded woman—vampire—wasn't in a fighting pose at all, one hip cocked to the side, her hand resting on it with brash, cavalier confidence. Her back was to me, but I could hear the lilting, throaty roll of her laughter.

"Oh, James, and to think I was worried!" She said his name so casually, warmly, even, like it was her right to use it. I supposed it was, but it stung just the same. What stung more, to my dismay, was the sight of James easing out of the crouch to lean against the ruined side of the Taurus, one elbow lifting to rest on the hood, the other hand dipping into the pocket of his jeans. One corner of his mouth tilted up in a familiar smirk.

"Victoria," he said, drawing out the name. "What the hell are you doing here?" The words should have been hard, angry, but instead he sounded almost amused. Lying on the ground with my heart pounding and my tongue stinging, I nearly missed the lightning-quick flash of his eyes to mine before he returned his gaze to his former lover's face. I did catch it, though, and caught the message in it: _don't move_. She stepped forward, her hand going from her hip to trace a light pattern on his chest. I watched, frozen, almost afraid to breathe lest she realize I wasn't actually unconscious.

"When you… disappeared," she began, her finger drawing a circle around the breast pocket of his jacket, "I didn't know what to think. So I went to the only source of information I could think of." James lifted his chin as her hand spiraled up towards his collarbone, nostrils flaring. Victoria chuckled again, and continued. "I asked the Cullens." At the name, my lips parted, my body tensing. "And what did they tell me?" James hummed, almost a purr, and rolled his head on his shoulders.

"I don't know," he drawled. "What did they tell you?"

"That you had run off with their little human friend. The girl from the field that day, the one you wanted to hunt." She stopped, but there was a clear delight in the brief silence, an obvious dramatic pause. James tilted his head, the panther once more.

"And?" Victoria stepped closer, mere inches between them now. James's eyes flicked to mine once more, or maybe I just imagined it. I held my breath, listening with everything I had.

"And," she went on, "the little pixie one, the one who sees things… She told me the most _interesting_ thing. It made the mind-reader _very_ upset, you know. He practically threw a tantrum," she added, amused. "He wanted to come with me, but they convinced him it was useless. I still came, though. I'm not so quick to believe in visions." James bent towards her, one hand still in his pocket, the other absently twining a lock of her wild red-gold hair.

"What did she tell you, Victoria?" he asked, voice barely loud enough for me to hear. She leaned into him, tilting her face up to whisper something in his ear. James jerked his head away, brows going down, and Victoria threw back her head and laughed. "But here I came all this way and you were eating her after all! So she must have been wrong."

"Must have been," James agreed. He sounded so controlled that I dropped my eyes to his left hand; sure enough, I could see it clenching through the pocket of his jeans. Victoria purred, slipping her hands along his shoulders.

"So why don't we share her and go find something a little more wild? Make… a night of it…" she added, and licked his cheek. James inhaled sharply, his eyes going feral. I swallowed hard, trying to push myself up but forgetting not to use my broken wrist. I fell back to the ground with hiss of pain, and Victoria spun around. She saw me, her mouth curving wickedly, and ran her tongue along her lower lip. "Mm," she said, one hand still on James's shoulder, "she's a feisty one. I can see why you like her." She took a step towards me, eyes flashing to black, and I scrambled backwards in a pathetic, awkward crabwalk. Before Victoria had gotten more than a foot, James's hand darted from his pocket and caught her by the arm. She froze, twisting her head towards him, body still poised to come for me.

"She's mine," James said, voice low and strained. Whole body shaking, I focused on his face. He was looking at the other vampire, but his nostrils were flaring regularly and I knew he was overloading on the waves of my fresh terror as well as the undeniable lust radiating from the redhead. Victoria frowned.

"Yours? I know you're possessive, but don't I get a free pass?" She tugged at her arm. I couldn't see the movement, but James must have tightened his grip because Victoria winced and stopped pulling. With an irritated huff, she shook her arm free and stepped out of the way. "Fine," she said, glancing at me. "Kill her, then. I'm bored here."

I stopped inching backwards, my eyes locked on James. He stood before the Taurus, body straining forwards like a dog on point, everything about him taut. There was an instant of just that, just me on the ground and him by the car with Victoria standing watch like some nightmarish critic of our little play. Then I was on my feet, mind blank with a kind of white noise, arm screaming with the pain of having shoved myself up as I ran as fast as I could for the trees.

My heart was hammering so quickly that I couldn't even hear the separate beats, just a steady thrum of blood pumping through my veins as I hurled myself through the air with as much speed as my body would allow. There was nothing but running, nothing but getting as far away from the blackness eating up the air behind me, the blackness that had been threatening to take me over from the day Edward Cullen came into my life. I made the treeline, a low branch slicing a thin fiery line across one cheek, blood pounding in my ears. Then, my foot caught on a downed mess of trunks and I went sprawling, landing in wet leaves and mud. I screamed when I fell, more out of surprise than anything else, and managed to claw my way to my knees before he was on me.

James leaped over the fallen tree I'd tripped on and twisted in the air, landing directly in front of me. He went down in that awful, predatory crouch instantly upon hitting the earth, one hand shooting out to knock me backwards. I toppled, arms windmilling in a futile play for balance, and went down on my back in the undergrowth. I flung my good arm up in front of my face as James fell on me, catching him in the throat with my mud-smeared forearm. He snarled and batted it away, slamming me down by the shoulders when I tried to roll out from under him. I screamed again, the cry dissolving into a ragged sob, twisting my face away and squeezing my eyes shut against the sight of him on top of me, totally lost to the animal need to feed. The tenderness, the hesitance of when he'd touched me in the car, was gone, ripped away by Victoria's throaty laughter and my sweet, sweet fear.

James was heavy on me, knees pressing into the ground on either side of my hips, hands hard on my shoulders as he lowered his head and roughly nuzzled my throat. This time, when I felt his teeth on me, the scrape was abrasive and painful and I sobbed again, an awful, wheezing noise, the side of my face pressed into rotten leaves and wet moss and the musky stench of mud.

"Don't," I said as his teeth closed around the side of my throat, not biting yet, just testing my skin the way a cat will test a mouse before tearing it in half. "Please, James, don't do this, not like this, not like this, oh fuck, oh god, oh god, James, please!" The words became a spill, a torrent, helpless and breathless and torn from somewhere deep inside me. He paused, mouth hot on my neck, hot with my sweat and terror and humanity. "James," I said again, desperate, opening my eyes to stare wildly at the undergrowth and tree trunks I could see directly to my right. "James, you can hear me, I know you can hear me, James, please!" There was a terrible moment of hard, deep pain as his teeth tightened and dug into my flesh, and then his head lifted. I swung my head upright, frantically searching for some sign of _him_ beneath the hunger. His eyes, black and dangerous and cruel, stared back unblinkingly. The forest around us was very still.

Then, he took a ragged breath.

"Bella," he said, eyes wavering. I didn't dare move. James swallowed, closed his eyes. When he opened them again, they were red. A flood of relief so intense I nearly fainted swept my system. He shook his head, seeming almost confused. "I really want to bite you," he told me hoarsely. "Why aren't I?"

"You don't want to kill me," I said, nearly crying with it, the words blurring together. "Oh, Jesus, James, _you_ _don't want to kill me_." Slowly, as if forcing himself away from a fifty-dollar buffet, he sat back on his knees and let me hike myself up on my elbows beneath him.

"She'll expect me to do it," he said then, more to himself than to me. "She'll think something's… wrong…" He frowned, eyes going distant, and I thought of the way his face had changed when Victoria had whispered whatever Alice had seen in his ear. I swallowed, not really wanting to wait for him to decide that, whether he wanted to or not, killing me really was the only option. My suicidal impulse in the Taurus, now that I'd been horrifyingly close to a death far more vicious than the one I'd foolishly imagined when he'd asked me what I wanted, was well and truly gone.

"Drink, then," I suggested shakily, before I could talk myself out of it. "Drink from me, but don't… don't take it all. Tell her you're keeping me for that. Tell her I taste better than anyone else. Tell her anything." His mouth twisted distractedly before the words sunk in, and then James's eyes snapped down to mine.

"What?" I was breathing hard again, my heart fluttering somewhere around my throat.

"Cut me somewhere and drink enough to prove you did. I won't get—I won't get what you have, and you won't have to kill me, and she won't think you've lost your mind." He studied my face, as if searching for some kind of trick, and then gave a short, humorless laugh.

"I'd have to stop," he said. "I'd have to stop before I took too much."

"You stopped before," I reminded him stubbornly, shaking my hair away from my face. James's face went very still. He tilted his head towards me, breathed in.

"You trust me, then?" he asked. I took in a breath, let it out.

"I do," I lied, and then he'd flashed a jackknife from his jeans pocket and my stomach shrieked as he opened a gash just below my ribcage. I shrieked too, good hand flying up to fist in his ponytail as he shoved my shirts up around my breasts and bent his head to my abdomen.

It hurt. It hurt _bad_. My stomach felt on fire, my head going woozy as he drank. His hands slid roughly from just beneath my breasts along the curve of my waist to my hips, thumbs pressing into the knobs of bone that arched alongside my belly. I bucked my hips, spine arching, hand spasming at the nape of his neck as my heels kicked the useless watchful earth. He groaned against me, low and sexual and hungry, and the sound sent a jolt of pure lust through the pain. James dragged his head up, chin smeared crimson, and kissed me on the mouth. He swallowed my gasp, my own blood sharp and metallic as his tongue tangled with mine. The kiss was brief, passionate, ferocious, and then he ducked his head again and lifted me up by the hips to meet him as he returned to the wound on my stomach. I cried out as his mouth invaded me, my blood racing to him, my heart pumping for me, for him, for this. He let go of my waist, hands struggling with the waistband of my pants; I tilted my head back as my own blood dried sticky and warm around my mouth, and wriggled my hips to help him shove the sweatpants down my legs. I felt the ground, cold and damp against my bare skin. James laughed, guttural, the wet sound of blood leaving my body mixing with the vibration. I tugged at his shirt, mindless, lost somewhere in a swirling fog of pain and desire, and he whipped his jacket off and lifted his head just briefly enough for me to yank the shirt away. His hands fumbled at his belt and I sunk my teeth into my lower lip, snarling, hands snaking up his bare chest to claw down his back as he managed to jerk down the zipper on his jeans.

He thrust into me with no hesitation, whole body moving with the same primal rhythm as he drew blood from my stomach and angled my hips with his own. A harsh, shocked sound fell from my lips as my head whipped from one side to the other, my red-stained mouth falling open, my broken wrist slamming up above my head as my good hand ripped away the band that held his ponytail and wound tightly in his hair. James growled, the rumbling going from his chest to mine, and I struggled to stay conscious as blood loss and adrenaline swept my head into a dizzy spin. I was moving with him now, my hand in his hair keeping his head pressed against my stomach, my own eyes squeezed shut as I felt his body moving in mine. There had never been anything like this. There would never be anything like this.

When I came, it was with a violent, crashing burst of spotty white light. I gasped, yanking his head up and kissing him hard enough to hurt, blood tacky on my cheeks and wet in my mouth. He kissed me back, shuddering, before tearing his head away and fastening his lips once more to my stomach. My hand fell back, hitting the damp earth with a hazy, slow-motion smack, and I felt him pull away as the world began to go dark.

My consciousness was dim at best as James lifted his head at last, my breath coming in shaky, uneven little pulls. I rolled my head slightly to watch him work my pants back up my legs to settle loosely at my hips, my lips moving soundlessly as James did up his own zipper and turned to grab his abandoned shirt. I lifted my right hand dazedly, trying to touch him, maybe, but it fell back mere inches off the ground.

"Don't try to move," he said roughly, an undertone of panic running through his tone, or maybe I just imagined that. I was quite sure, though, that he folded the white undershirt and held it against the wound on my belly, hands firm and strong as he applied pressure to the gash. I tried to look down, tried to see what he'd done to me, but all I could make out over the fragile heaving of my own chest were the backs of his hands, stained red, more blood seeping up through his fingers.

Keeping one hand on the folded shirt, James managed to roll me up to brace my shoulders with his other arm. He snagged his jacket and tucked it around my waist.

"Hold onto that," he told me, taking my right hand and placing it over the makeshift compress on my abdomen. I blinked, mouth very dry, and tried to press down. Doing so hurt too much, and I let out a weak cry of pain as he bit out a curse and swung me up into his arms. My left arm dangled in the air, the splint knocking against his knee as he ran with me. I had a brief sense of déjà-vu, remembering him walking with me in the inn earlier, but now his arms were almost too tight, his stride fast enough that my eyes hurt watching the trees blaze by.

We reached the ruined Taurus in a matter of seconds, James twisting one hand to apply pressure to the compress when it became clear that I was unable to do anything more than whimper. Victoria was sitting on the roof of the car, her legs swinging childishly in and out of the passenger seat through the hole left by the door that now rested at a jagged angle on the ground. When she saw us, she jumped down and cocked her head in the same darkly inquisitive way that James did.

"Correct me if I'm wrong," she said, lips turning down in a pout, "but _that_ doesn't look dead."

"She's more fun alive," he told her, and I let out a short, humorless laugh. Neither of them looked at me. Victoria paused, studying him, and then smirked.

"She was right, wasn't she?" James's hold on me tightened another notch. "The Cullen girl."

"Alice," I whispered, and again, was ignored by both.

"Of course not," James scoffed, taking another step forward. Victoria shook her head.

"Don't lie to me, James," she warned him, shoulders rising dangerously. "I _know you_."

"Then you know to leave now," he replied coldly, the feral, wicked heat of their last conversation gone. Victoria smiled, just as cold.

"Don't worry," she said. "I want no part in this. We had good times, but if you're going to turn into another pathetic human-lover, I don't-"

"I'm _not_," James broke in harshly, taking another instinctive step towards her, "turning into one of those—" He stopped, shook his head. "It doesn't matter, Victoria. There's nothing for you here."

"Not even you?" she asked, and for the first time I saw the hurt simmering just below the affected disdain. I remembered him talking about her in the car, the slight laugh, what I could now recognize as fondness. Twelve years. They'd been together for twelve years, and now, after three days with me, he was telling her to go.

James didn't answer for a long time. Then, Victoria ducked her head and laughed, eying the ground, shaking out her hair.

"So you're really doing this," she said, a half-smile tilting her full lips. James just watched her steadily, face impassive. "All right."

"You won't come after us," he said, not a question, and she nodded once.

"That's a little ironic," Victoria said, voice light over the disappointment I could read in her too-contained stance. "After everything, all we owe each other is staying out of the way."

"Was it ever going to be something else?" he asked, and she shrugged, conceding the point. And then, while the night came ever on, while I huddled in James's arms and bled, Victoria turned and vanished into the treeline.

As soon as she was gone, James braced me against his chest, flipping my left hand up to cross my stomach with the other, and starting running.


	14. Help

The brown mutt was panicking again. In the last kennel, backed into a corner, tail scrunched down between its trembling back legs, lips drawn back over yellow teeth as it barked and barked and barked. Sarah Thomas, watching it from the cage door, felt a little like crying. It was late, she was alone, it had been more than twenty-three hours since she'd slept, and the brown mutt was panicking again.

"Come on," she said to it, one hand on the door latch as the other fingered a syringe. "Don't make me come in there." Sarah didn't like sedating animals unless she knew it would keep them from feeling pain; she didn't like the curl of power it sent through her. Being able to control the consciousness of another living creature… disturbed her, on some level that she couldn't quite name. She wanted to just fix them and send them along, and any sly little thrill of god syndrome was just—unwelcome.

The dog made a rough half-yelp, eying her, and she smiled at it hopefully.

"It's almost eleven," she told it as soothingly as she could, "and your mom is going to be back for you tomorrow at three. So there's really no need to lose it. And you're feeling much better now, aren't you? Not even any surgery!" Slowly, suspiciously, the brown dog slunk out of its corner and lowered itself heavily to the floor at the edge of the cage farthest away from Sarah, who sighed and let her needle-hand drop to one side. "Ok," she breathed, and turned to go put the syringe away.

Sarah was at the front desk, shutting down the main computer, by the time the clock on the wall behind her struck 11:00 PM. She sat in the swivel chair that Angela, the regular receptionist, had lifted to the point where Sarah's feet barely touched the ground. Angela was far too tall for her own good, as far as Sarah was concerned. As she waited for the computer screen to go black, a sudden wave of tiredness washed her and Sarah let her chin droop into one hand, the elbow braced on the desk.

"What are you doing here?" she asked herself aloud, just her and the humming computer and the animal sounds from the back room. "Seriously, Sarah, what are you still doing here?" It wasn't like it was the first time. She'd even brought the cot in after Jonah complained about her getting home too late and upsetting the kids. _Although really_, she thought grimly, _isn't getting woken up at 3 better than not seeing your mom for days on end?_ And yet here she was, yet again. Alan, the other practicing vet, would get in at 8:30, as usual, bearing coffee and a smug story about whatever date he'd had… and Sarah would…

Come in after him. Still smelling of fresh, homemade breakfast. Glancing at the clock over her shoulder, Sarah pushed the spinning chair away from the desk and stood. Resolved, she went to grab her coat from her little private office.

She was at the door, her hand searching in her pocket for the keys to lock up, when she saw them.

At first, she thought it was just one person. Just one person with… really broad shoulders… and… a mane? Blinking, Sarah pressed her face against the glass of the front door and cupped her hand around her eyes. _Two_ people, she realized, one carrying the other. Coming across the parking lot at a near-run, moving with the kind of purpose you expect to see in firemen or cops. Coming, she saw with an odd burst of apprehension, towards the hospital. Towards her.

Sarah wasn't sure why she didn't just lock the door. Why she didn't turn around and walk away. But as the figures approached, Sarah found that turning away wasn't really an option. They were closer now, halfway across the parking lot. She could see details, dimly, through the light of the far-off streetlamps and the automatics just outside the hospital. The one walking, he… he didn't look like he had a shirt on, and he was covered in… covered in… Some kind of stains, is what her brain supplied, some kind of—like oil, maybe, or paint, covered in paint, some kind of accident involving a lot of red… and her stomach was curdling now, tightening, and Sarah thought that maybe she really ought to go back to where the kennels were. Maybe she really ought to go and check on the animals, and maybe find an empty cage while she was at it, and get inside, and lock the door.

Then, just as she was taking the first hesitant step backwards, one hand still in her pocket on the ring of her keys, they reached the front entrance and the man covered in

(blood)

paint lifted a foot and kicked it open without even pausing.

"You're a doctor?" he asked her, Sarah Thomas standing with her mouth open in the stale sterile air, all alone, and his _eyes_, there was something wrong with his _eyes_ but she couldn't focus on them because dear sweet Jesus that _was blood all over_. The girl, the girl in his arms, all dark hair and pale skin and red, red stains, jerked. He winced at the movement, and Sarah felt herself begin to breathe faster.

"I—I'm a vet," she said inanely, and shook her head. "I'm sorry, I can't… You need to leave. We're closed."

"She's hurt," he told her, as if she couldn't tell, as if that weren't obvious, as if there weren't blood fucking _everywhere_ (on his face, on his face, oh god, why was it on his _face_) and Sarah shook her head again and backed up towards the desk. There was a phone there, and maybe she could throw something at them, make him lose his balance; maybe she could manage to get to the phone in time to call the cops before he came for her.

Before she got two steps, the young man with his skin all spattered red narrowed those impossible, something-wrong eyes and—and they were red, too, weren't they? My god, was there so much blood that his _eyes_ had been—? But no, that was stupid, that was ridiculous; _pull it together_, she thought desperately, _pull it together, you've seen blood before!_ Not human blood, though, and not… not whatever _he_ was. That was a thought, though, that she couldn't really allow inside her head at this particular moment, couldn't allow inside her world because perhaps she would snap. Perhaps she would snap, and he would be whatever the hell he was, and she would spend the rest of her days pretending to be sane.

"You need to fix her," he said, and there was an odd buzzing to the words. A vibration in the air, a hazy sort of shimmer around him, and suddenly Sarah realized that she wasn't actually that afraid at all.

"But I'm not a people doctor," she said, blinking hard, feeling oddly adrift. "I do animals, not girls." She was already walking backwards, though, beckoning him towards the surgery hall just beyond the waiting room. He was beside her in a flash, moving so fast that Sarah felt her stomach flip, sure she'd had a momentary blackout. _Oh, god, what if that's what this is? What if I've finally spent too much time here alone and I've just lost it? What if none of this—_ And then he was setting the girl down on the metal table they used for dog exams, startlingly gentle, and Sarah put aside the matted stack of clothes and jacket that had been used as a temporary bandage and pulled up the girl's shirt to see the source of all that blood. "I'm really not supposed to do this," she said, staring at the ugly gash just beneath the girl's ribcage.

"Don't worry about that," the man snapped, "just help her!" He looked at her, hands braced on the metal table, bloody face snarling with threat and an underlying surge of anxiety.

"Ok," Sarah said instantly, and then clapped a hand over her mouth. She hadn't meant to say that. She looked down, seeing the girl on the table with her white, white face and her red, red stomach, and felt her heart skip a beat. She hadn't meant to bring them in here, either. She looked up at the man who was not a man. "I, um, I need… I need you to go," she stammered. "I need to—you can't be in here. I can help her. But I need for you to not… be in here."

"I'm not going anywhere until I know if she's dying," he said, and there was something wrong with the way he phrased it, something _off_ about his emphasis but she couldn't think about that too right now; she couldn't analyze all of this because all of this was fucking insane. He did back away from the table, though, and go to lean in one corner of the room. She glanced at him nervously, and saw that he'd tugged a black button-up shirt from the pile of clothes on the table and was shrugging it on over his red-smeared torso.

Sarah swallowed hard, and then turned back to her would-be patient.

The girl, who she now noted couldn't possibly be older than eighteen, had been slashed in the stomach by some sort of knife. Deeply. And then… savaged, somehow, like someone had… had… Her breath sped up again, heart stuttering, not daring to look to her side to see the man with the bloody face. Like someone had worried the wound, sucked at it like an animal. _Oh, sweet Jesus_.

She cleaned the girl's abdomen with disinfectant and stitched up the wound as quickly and efficiently as possible, her hand automatically steadying as soon as she picked up the needle. Then, using a pair of scissors, Sarah cut away the rest of the girl's ruined shirt and set it aside, her gloved hands stained as red as the fabric.

"She needs blood," she said, almost to herself, as if realizing it for the first time. "I don't… We don't have human blood here."

"Do something for her arm," the other one said shortly. "I'll get you blood." And he was gone, just like that. And Sarah did something for her arm.

It was calming, making the cast. It was routine, it was familiar, it was… normal. And then she washed the rest of the blood off her human patient, heart nearly breaking as she cleaned the girl's delicate face.

"What happened to you?" she whispered, easing one of her spare t-shirts over the girl's slender shoulders, and then decided almost immediately that she did not really want to know.

He came back almost as soon as she was finishing up the cast. She didn't hear him enter, didn't hear him move through the hall, didn't hear him step up behind her until his voice, low and even and somehow unnerving in its mellow steadiness, broke the silence.

"I brought four bags. It's her blood type." She whirled around, heart jumping up into her throat, and he was standing only inches away. He smelled of the earth, and of copper, and of night, and Dr. Sarah Thomas was never more frightened than she was in that moment with this man, this not-man, this _wrongness_ standing close enough to touch her. He held out the packets of blood, hospital issue, and she took them with shaking hands.

Setting up the IV line for the transfusion was good. Another rote thing, part of her routine. It made her breathing steady itself, made her heart calm down. And, thank every god that ever existed, the transfusion took.

"She's going to be okay," Sarah told herself and the stranger both, almost laughing with it. "She's going to be fine."

"You're sure?"

"I'm sure." She hesitated. "I need… I need to move her. Somewhere more comfortable. There's a bed in my office, if—" Before she could finish, he'd stepped over to the table and, very carefully, lifted the girl. Sarah grabbed the IV tower and rushed them into her office, the unexpected speed with which he moved working in their favor. She got the girl situated on her cot and lightly brushed the hair from the pale, elfin face. There was something about this young woman, this bruised and bloodied girl, that brought out a streak of protectiveness Sarah hadn't felt in years. Not since her own children, young as they were, had started school.

Then, taking a deep breath, she turned to face the thing that looked like a handsome, equally battered young man.

"You need to wait outside," she told him, her courage gathered around her like a cloak. "She needs rest, and she doesn't need you scaring her if she wakes up. She'll be disoriented enough as it is without all the…" Sarah trailed off, but the rest of her sentence was obvious. There was a moment of tense, rising pressure… and then he snorted.

"Fine. But if something goes wrong," he said, horrid devil eyes jumping to hers, "and she dies…" It was his turn to trail off. The rest of his sentence was just as obvious. Sarah swallowed again, her fingers trembling, and nodded.

Slowly, moving like a jungle cat who is waiting on a very delectable sort of prey, he stepped out of the room. Sarah let out her breath in a whoosh, and turned back to the unconscious girl she had "fixed".

"I don't know who you are," she said, the exhaustion that had left at the first sight of the strangers returning with a vengeance, "but if I get killed over you I'm going to be mad as hell." The girl made no reply, her shadowed, bruised eyelids twitching in her sleep. Sarah sighed, went to her desk chair, and sat down to wait.


	15. Reborn

**Ok, three week hiatus coming up.**

I remembered bright lights. That sterile, medicinal smell. Something wet on my face. I remembered being jostled, my head rolling against something cold and hard, like metal. I remembered loud voices, someone running alongside me, the crashing sound of a dog barking or someone screaming, I couldn't tell which. I remembered James's voice, low and static-y by my head:

"Don't worry about that, just help her!"

I remembered pain.

Things were fuzzy, coming back. I was aware of light before anything else, beating at my eyelids, refusing to let me slip back under. Slowly, blearily, I opened my eyes. I was lying on my back on some kind of cot, my hands at my sides. There was a quiet, steady ache in my wrist, but the searing pain in my belly was gone. Carefully, I lifted my left arm and stared at the new, white cast that encased it from mid-forearm to my thumb. I could see a fresh bandage peeking out on my palm.

Propping myself up on my left elbow, I pushed the thin blanket I was covered by down around my waist and gingerly pulled up the hem of my plain white shirt. Someone had removed my bloody clothes, I noted. That same someone had properly casted my broken wrist, and as my shirt lifted over my stomach, I saw that there was a clean white bandage taped neatly beneath my ribs. I touched it gently, and my stomach went queasy.

Lying back, already tired, I turned my head away from the wall on my left side and noticed for the first time the IV-line taped to the crook of my right elbow. I looked up, following the red tube up the tall metal stand that held not a bag of the ubiquitous clear fluid that you see in medical dramas, but a plastic packet of blood. A transfusion, I realized, feeling faint. I thought about when I used to pass out at the mere thought of blood, and felt a dark curl of humor.

Focusing on breathing evenly, I looked around again. I was in a small, office-like room, the cot up against one wall. Across the room was a door, and beside that was a desk covered with papers. There were pictures on the wall, and several framed certificates printed with a curly font that I couldn't read. This all struck me as strange, but before I could try again to sit up, the door to my right swung open.

A woman in pale blue scrubs under a lightweight cotton sweater, the kind that buttons up the front, walked in carrying a small plastic pill bottle and a clipboard. She saw me looking at her, and her mouth opened. No sound came out for a choppy, awkward moment, and then she made her way to the side of the bed and checked the bag of blood.

"How are you feeling?" she asked, sounding oddly nervous. I swallowed, smoothing my new shirt down over my bandaged stomach.

"Ok, I guess," I told her, eyes darting to the door she'd come in through. "Where, um, where am I?" She flushed, and I realized that she was pretty. Younger than I'd first thought, too, probably in her early 30s.

"Algonquin, Illinois," she said, setting the clipboard on the mattress by my IV-hooked arm and unscrewing the cap on the pill bottle. "Edgewood Center Veterinary Hospital. I'm Dr. Sarah Thomas." I blinked.

"I'm at a vet's? You're…"

"That's right," she confirmed, not looking at me. The nervousness was still there, hovering around her, and I sat up a little on the bed.

"Where's James?" I shook my head. "The guy who—"

"Outside," she interrupted quickly, and I saw that her hand was trembling as she poured two pills into the opposite palm. "I told him you needed rest." My heart stuttered.

"Did he hurt you?" I asked her sharply, pushing myself up further, the IV line swaying at my side. "He didn't… do anything to you, did he?"

"Just brought you in," she said with a quick shake of the head, and then stopped. The woman, Sarah Thomas, looked at me for a long moment. Her eyes softened. "I told him we only help animals here, but he wouldn't take no for an answer. We didn't have any human blood, for transfusions, and you'd lost so much…" I felt cold.

"Where did you get this, then?" I asked softly, tilting my head towards the bag.

"I don't know," she replied, sounding a little lost. "He… he brought it." She held out the pills. I took them questioningly. "Iron supplements," she explained, and I swallowed them dryly. Lying back, I let out a breath.

"And you helped me," I said slowly, feeling the weight of the new cast on my left arm.

"There was so much blood," Dr. Thomas told me, steadying the IV as if she couldn't quite make herself just stand still. Her eyes met mine, then flashed away. "All over both of you. You were unconscious, and he… I couldn't say no."

"I'm sorry," I said, looking to the ceiling. I was in _her_ office, I realized belatedly, lying on the cot she probably slept on when she stayed overnight. I turned my head again and sought her gaze, holding it. "I'm so sorry."

"No," she said, a surprising intensity backing her voice. She gave me a shaky smile, embarrassed, and capped the bottle of iron pills. "No, I… I was glad to do it. You can't stay here, though. We open in an hour, and if someone finds you here…" She trailed off, bit her lower lip in hesitation, and then took a sharp, decisive breath. "I imagine you two aren't on such good terms with the authorities," Dr. Thomas said carefully. I laughed, shaking my head once.

"It's complicated," I told her. "Thank you." She shrugged it away, turning, and I reached out my right hand and caught her sleeve. "You saved my life," I said when she looked back. She stared at me, our eyes locked together in this moment of understanding, our two lives connected by the light. Then, with a sharp nod, obviously gathering her self-composure, Dr. Sarah Thomas walked out of the room.

Left on my own once more, I lay back and shoved my fingers through my hair. _My god_, I thought, completely randomly, _Charlie must be scared out of his mind_. I wondered what he'd think if he knew… if he knew what… I closed my eyes, mind whirling back to that mad, frenzied time in the forest. I took stock of myself, unable to really concentrate on that actual facts—

(you slept with James)

—and realized that, aching body and blood loss aside, I actually felt… kind of amazing. Powerful. Different. I felt like I had faced the beast, and I had won. Something thudded outside, footsteps, and my eyes snapped open.

Seconds later, the door banged open again and James entered. He walked swiftly to my side, eyes darting to the packet of blood before he inspected my battered form. There was dried blood on his face and neck and hands, crusting brown and flaky against his smooth pale skin. Even his hair, which was back in its usual ponytail, was streaked with red. He looked like a near-murder victim, a comparison that made me want to laugh. He had, at least, put on the black overshirt to cover what was undoubtedly an even more messy chest.

"You're all right?" he asked tersely, and frowned when I giggled.

"You look," I said, suddenly quite delirious, "like I feel." James looked confused, glancing down at himself. "Like you've just been attacked by Freddy Kreuger," I clarified, and he rolled his eyes impatiently.

"You don't smell like death anymore," he said, and I coughed.

"That's nice. You sound worried. Were you worried?" I remembered the face-off with Victoria, his possessive grip on me. The giddiness dropped like stones. "What did she tell you?" I asked, sobering. James blinked, his red, predator's gaze unreadable.

"Who?"

"Victoria. She whispered something. She said Alice was right. What did she tell you?" He laughed, or tried to, but there was little humor in the sound.

"She told me…" James shook his head. "When Victoria was going to kill you," he said, randomly, "I wanted to rip her throat out." My lips parted, shock and fear blurring together with a terrible, stupid hope. My heart, crueler than he'd ever been, seized.

"But you care about her," I said, hesitant, feeling small and uncertain and weak on my back in this stupid little cot. His mouth twisted wryly.

"I can't do this," James admitted, hunkering down to rest an elbow on my mattress and trace his fingers down my arm until he reached the place where the needle went in. He looked at that, brows furrowed. "What I said before, about… things like me and things like you, it was true. It was right."

"You hunt me," I repeated for him, heart pounding. His nostrils flared, and I knew he could smell everything.

"Alice Cullen," James said then, very calm, "told Victoria that you were going to fall in love with me." He stopped, eyes going to mine. I waited, frozen. I could not deny it, despite the screaming in my head. "Alice Cullen," he began again, drawing out the words, "told Victoria that I was going to…"

"Your kind," I whispered when he didn't go on, "isn't very good at love. Not if there's an easier option." His gaze flickered, and I knew he recognized the quote.

"There is," he said, and suddenly the hand that had been resting lightly by my elbow was at my throat, tilting my jaw to one side. "Or there should be. Should have been."

"You didn't kill me in the woods," I reminded him. "Either time."

"But I'm probably going to kill you someday," he countered, a dark, subtle sadness twisting his face. I licked my lips, wishing I had something to drink. My mouth tasted bloody still, and the smell of it from James's body was overpowering. He was still touching me, touching my throat, and in that moment I wanted to either drag him closer or set him on fire. This love, this dangerous unwelcome thing, felt like acid through me. I couldn't, though. I couldn't look away.

"Probably," I allowed. "You could turn me."

"I could turn you." His hand on my throat tightened, and then eased. I looked up at him from the bed, bruised and battered and harder than I'd ever been. He might kill me… but after all of this, reborn through all my brand new scars… I might kill him, first.

"We'll see?" I asked, giving him the exit that I'd never had, not from the beginning, offering him one last chance to end this now. Part of me hoped he'd take it, snap my neck or just walk out, give us both the easy death one way or another. Mine literal, his eternal. James paused. I wondered if, if this were it, he would make it quick. And then a wicked grin lit his face; he checked the IV, grabbed the mostly-empty bag, and scooped me off the mattress.

"We'll see," he agreed, raw and bloodstained and beautiful. "Let's go get that damn toothbrush."

And, Dr. Sarah Thomas watching from the smoldering fragments of the world as she'd known it, my laughter ringing in our wake, we spilled out into the dawn.


	16. Entropy

**I'm baaack. Excited? You should be. Because during my several 16-36 hour sections of travel by train or plane or whatever, as well as during free time, I managed to get three chapters down and have a decent idea of where I want to go with this. ALSO-- I am changing the name of the story! After this chapter, so no one will be confused, I am, repeat, CHANGING THE NAME to "The Backs of Hurricanes". It's a title more suited to a long story, and I like it more (I go for the more poetic titles, see, when I spend time on something) and it is a song reference so anyone who catches that wins. Also, I made a playlist for this fic because I was bored, and eventually I'll upload that for you guys if you're interested.**

**Oh, and I'm reformatting so that the scene with Dr. Thomas is a part of the story instead of just sort of stuck there.**

Calling home was hard. Harder than I'd expected. It was the kind of nerve-shattering hard that makes your voice, so unable to cope with what it must, go soft and halting. I didn't know what to say, what I _could _say, what could possibly take my abrupt disappearance and the brutality of my parting words and smooth them over, cool the scorch marks I'd left in my wake.

In the end, though, my uncertainty and inability to function audibly turned out to be irrelevant. James cut off the call as soon as I'd managed to shakily assure Charlie that I was all right. His hand swiped the phone from mine and dropped it into the cradle so quickly that my ear was still ringing with the sound of my father's worried voice when the click of plastic replaced the hum of the line. Startled and indignant, I spun around to face him.

"Why'd you do that? I wasn't done!" He sighed, and I stung with irritation as his head tilted in the way an older sibling does with a child who has said something profoundly stupid.

"They can track your location via telephone," he said. "And he'd never just let you go."

"Sounds like someone else I know," I said snidely, folding my arms. The gesture was made awkward by the cast that covered my left arm from midforearm to palm, but the meaning was clear. James stepped forwards, hands going out to grip the metal box of the pay phone, effectively blocking me in. His chest brushed mine, and I shivered despite myself. He smiled.

"I thought you didn't want to leave," he said, something arch in that smooth, grey-silk voice. I swallowed, the instinctive fear zapping nervously at the back of my throat.

"That doesn't mean I want to be your slave, either," I retorted, determinedly ignoring the way his right hand was now making casual circles on my left shoulder.

"Hm," James said thoughtfully, his haunting, alien eyes going murky."That's what I had planned at first, but I suppose that's changed now." I snorted to hide the slight trembling of my fingers. Despite everything, everything and nothing, he still threw me, unnerved me... scared me.

It wasn't that I'd gone into this, whatever _this _was, blind. It wasn't that I didn't know that he could, would, kill me without even trying. My stomach, stitched and taped. My wrist, splinted and still aching. My bruised, tired face. All of these his work, his marks on me. It was that I knew _all _of it...

And I didn't care.

"Damn right it has," I said boldly, counting on his humor to find my bravado endearing rather than irritating. It worked, and James's smile widened. Not quite enough teeth were bared for it to be a threat, but my eyes still caught on that thin line of white. He leaned his head in and brushed his nose against my cheek, inhaling the scent of my skin. This was a habit that I had yet to get used to, though I knew it was par for the course with his kind. It still made me mildly uncomfortable, put on the spot, as if he was smelling me for signs of drug use or neglect rather than for the blood we both could feel coursing through me.

James backed off, letting me step away from the pay phone box. He didn't move his arms, though, and I nearly bumped into him coming down onto the pavement. His hands went to my hips, refusing to let me jerk away.

"I hate it when you do that," I said, my skin burning beneath my shirt where his fingers gripped me. I blinked, blinked away the memory of what those fingers could do.

"Why do you think I do it?" he asked smugly, and then let his fingers slip heavily off my waist as he turned to start towards the front of the diner where we'd stopped. I followed more slowly, feeling my heart return to its usual pace as my stomach uneasily stopped clenching with that confusing mix of fear, lust and anticipation. If I'd thought that, after I finally slept with him, James would stop affecting me the way he did... I'd been dead wrong. If anything, it was worse. Now all he had to do was touch me, give me that wicked, heavy-lidded stare, and it was like beads of fire were spattering against the inside of my belly. Almost pain, this heat, and yet...

It had been one day since the confrontation with Victoria. Since meeting Sarah Thomas. Since signing away my future to a life that was fairly certain to end short and hard and bloody. And through the stealing of a second car (we'd found the keys behind the radio), more and more hours of driving that were pleasantly, if unnervingly, numbed by pain medication, I had finally begun to truly consider what the hell I'd gotten myself into.

James wasn't human. Was, in fact, a monster. A beautiful, addictive, terrifying monster. Protective and funny and gruffly kind, yes, but also possessive, domineering and even cruel. Too confusing to quantify, too many levels to map out, too dangerous to take for granted, too effortlessly charming not to want to trust. He was, as he'd joked, a study in contrasts. And now I was wagering my ability to navigate those contrasts, with my own life as the chips I risked losing. I had agreed to come with him, had agreed to take my chances as an outlaw not only from my family and my friends but from my entire _species_, because... because of what?

Because I'd been drunk on the smell of him, high on the seductive knowledge that I could have died... and had not. Because I'd been exhausted, overloaded, drugged, lost. Because of the blood. My blood. My blood, in him, forever.

Because I loved him?

Or I loved it. The beast. The danger. I was hooked on death, addicted to the sweet awful rush of it. And he was my twisted, modern version of the Reaper.

Or maybe that was psychobabble bullshit, and I was just helplessly in love with the man, the monster, the thing that lay in between and called itself James.

Whatever it was, whatever defined or explained the slippery tugging bridge I sensed between my heart and his, I had agreed to come. I'd _wanted_ to. I'd felt strong, wild, pumped up with the danger James exuded as if, by proximity, he had passed it along to me. Shadows, overlapping in the sun. I had, in fact, felt like, just maybe, I could be something more than human.

Now, as James's hand closed around my elbow and helped me duck into the left side of the car ('97 Audi, also blue), I wondered if Dr. Thomas hadn't put a little bit of something extra in that blood transfusion, because I must have been drunk on something more literal than vampire sex and phermones.

And yet...

I glanced at him, buckling myself in as he slid into the driver's seat. His blond hair, thick and straight and finally clean, brushed the nape of his neck from the leather band that held it at the back of his head. His smooth, predatory features moved together as he curled a lip at the car that pulled out abruptly in front of us, strong, slender fingers spinning the wheel to take us neatly around the sudden obstacle. The rings on his jacket glinted as sun reflected off the rearview mirror in a painful arrow. I watched as, impatiently, James shrugged out of his coat and handed it to me, probably having noticed my stare and thinking I was cold. I took it without bothering to protest and pulled it on, slightly dizzy at the heady, woodsy scent of him that enveloped me through the fabric. My eyes slid sideways again, and as I glanced at the pale skin of his arms and the lean muscles standing out in his left forearm as he turned the wheel, I nearly missed it. My gaze darted back up to just above his left elbow, as surrepticiously as I could manage.

Scratches.

I remembered clawing at him through the jacket when he'd been about to tear my throat out, and then again, a short time later, for a different reason. Once through thick cloth and leather, once across bare skin. One of these times, definitely the latter, had left marks. Shallow and nearly gone, but there.

I'd hurt him.

Something from me, from my fragile human body so bright with mortality, had left a mark on him, and that meant... maybe nothing. Maybe everything. The thought that there existed even the slightest chance of my evening the scales between us, of my being able to step into his world with something more than skin and blood and heartbeat was as sickening as it was intoxicating. Somehow, seeing the proof that James was not as invincible as he appeared made my stomach twist, and I pulled his jacket close around me with a shiver. I didn't want to hurt him. I didn't want to sit here, thinking about hurting him. But... my snapped wrist tingled, a ghost, an echo, whispering through pain.

I needed to be able to hurt him. If James was the panther, the wild cat living precariously beneath fine human skin, I needed to find my own wildness. He wouldn't turn me, not yet, wouldn't give up the sweetness of my scent or the beauty of me flushed and wanting when he teased my pulse to racing. And so, mortal, I needed to open up the edges of me before James erased me without a thought. If I could hurt him, if it was possible...

"What?" he asked suddenly, eyes glancing off me like bullets. My lips parted and James's brows went sharp and angled. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

"Like what?" I asked blankly, knowing. He didn't answer, just cut his eyes at me again and turned up the radio. Windows down, rock and roll smacked me in the chest and face in long, rhythmic waves. Strong guitar crashing in thick chords. Crimson and clover. Over and over. I closed my eyes. My heart, live and aching.

It was hours before we spoke again. I fell asleep, only not, only the kind of sleep where your ribs contract and your mouth goes dark and thick and dry. When James's voice splintered the blur of radionoise, I wet my lips before opening my eyes. We were parked, pulled off at a gravel-spattered arc of an overlook. I looked right first, out my window, and gasped. Mountains, all long cool shades of greenbluepurple, cascaded down from an indigo horizon. Distant and warm all at once, almost softer than velvet.

"Where are we?"

"Blue Ridge," he told me, left forearm resting atop the steering wheel, right hand looped through the bottom of my seat's headrest.

"What state?"

"Not sure." I got out of the car and went to the low rock wall that kept the overlook from being an actual dropoff. My hands on the cool stone, rough against my palms, I leaned forwards and breathed. Everything seemed more open here, far-off valleys and rounded slopes and tree-studded peaks that gave way to faded grayish craigs. Watercolored into the world, and farther East than I had ever been. I felt James behind me solid and sure, a presence that, in this place, seemed as uncontrollable and extreme and _right _as the mountains themselves.

His arms slid around my waist, fingers locking across my stomach several inches below the tender spot where the bandage started. I let him pull me up straight, dragging my palms across the stone so that they tingled as I smoothed them over the backs of his and laced the fingers of my good right hand down through his. My stomach awoke to him, a low sparking heat, and I inhaled deeply as he buried his nose in my dark hair.

"I need a shower," I said absently, my mind off flying. Here, now, in this impossible stillness, the dark was far behind and my heart was calm. Anything else, any kind of loudness of the soul, seemed inappropriate here. Like showing up at a funeral wearing those rubber ducky shoes you got in Goodwill and Grandpa's old pink blazer.

"Mm," James hummed, more like a purr than an agreement. "Here." Without turning me, he disengaged his left hand and moved my hair to one side of my neck. Slowly, he bent his head and ran his tongue from the hollow between my throat and my shoulder to the soft spot just beneath my left ear. I hissed in another breath and tilted my head further to the right, my eyes on the smooth rolling peaks that hovered out of the early evening mist. James's left hand slid around to my collarbone, his thumb finding the hollow of my throat as his palm pressed lightly against the flatness of my breastbone. He licked me again, tongue quick and sly and wicked as a cat's. I turned in his arms and kissed him, my mismatched palms against his cheeks, his temples, the small of my back pressed against the edge of the wall. Silently, James put his hands on the place where my thighs became my bottom and pushed. In a moment, I was sitting on the rock wall and he'd stepped between my legs and the air was light and sweet and we were kissing, kissing, my mind a shaking bird inside the sky of him. He touched my sides, tugging the skin, and I winced.

"Careful," I told him, "careful," and I thought of the bandage beneath my shirt and the stitches beneath that and wondered what would happen if they broke. He wasn't hungry now, wouldn't be for days or weeks, but his lips were and his eyes were and maybe-- but he was careful, surprising me, and unspeakably gentle around the wound he'd made, and there on the mountains I felt we were at the end of the world.

"Where are we going to go?" I asked him, a whisper, my soul all clenched for bursting.

"Anywhere we want," he told me, and in that instant I believed him.


	17. Dance

**Sorry, kids, this one's a bit short. Oh, well.**

Late. Maybe 10 PM. Closer to eleven? The dark was long, though, a great unyielding fist around the stars, the moon gleaming like an opal on that monumental hand. Everything was the dew, the dark, James holding me and guiding my feet as we turned slowly round and round on low wet grass. Dancing.

The music was loud, diluted through space and bodies as it came at us across the wide sloping park. A pavilion had been erected at one end of the meadow, this large unnatural pale thing that radiated sound like water or breath. The band wasn't one I knew, wasn't one James knew, was just a source of sound for us to move across. Their music was bluegrassy, filled with rhythm, and I felt my body try to follow what my clumsy feet could not. I stumbled, clutching awkwardly at his shoulder as James steadied me with ease.

"This," I said, almost smiling, "is the weirdest thing in the world." One light brow lifted.

"Coming from you..."

"Still." And it was. We'd heard the music, seen the park, pulled off the road near a thatchwork of pines and thick, towering oaks. James had taken my hand, the one unfettered by a cast, and led me through the trees until we'd found the source of the beat. Now, competing for space with ten thousand crickets a ways off from the bulk of the crowd, I let him spin me out and back in and managed to slide back into his arms without even missing a step. My splinted wrist rested lightly on his shoulder, my fingers just touching the cool skin at the bottom of his neck, and as he made my feet move with one palm sure against the small of my back, I smelled the thick heady wash of grass and forest and dirt and sweat and life.

I had never been dancing before. Not like this. I had never felt someone else's hands on me the way his were, felt my own body bend and relax in subtle, smooth obedience to someone else's silent will. In dancing with me, he made me graceful. It was a newer, more unfamiliar kind of intimacy, something that tore at me in a way his teeth never would. Here, now, it was impossible to ignore the way I felt about him. Impossible to ignore the thing I'd chosen.

Here.

Now.

His body was close and solid and real, somehow more so than my own. I tightened my grip on his shoulder, holding onto him with both arms, suddenly afraid. The humor of it all slid away, draining me down into some cold, quiet place inside. This couldn't happen. Couldn't _be_ happening. I couldn't be here, with James, as if everything were normal and I didn't... didn't _know_. My breath stuttered, the flesh across my belly and arms seething with goosebumps, and although I should have been pushing him away I couldn't stop myself from dragging James closer and clenching my right hand around his hard enough to make my fingers ache.

"Tell me this is ok," I told him, softer than before. His nostrils flared, and I knew he knew me. Everything in me was there for him, on the surface. He frowned, lifting me easily over a small log as we moved a hair closer to the forest.

"What?" I laughed, nervous, hating this weakness.

"I had a sudden... hit of reality," I admitted, "and I think if I heard it out loud..." James rotated us, controlling my movements effortlessly. His lip curled in mild disgust.

"And here was me, thinking we were past this." I tried to stop, but he dragged me around in another tight circle, edging us closer to the trees. His arms didn't tighten, his grip didn't shift, but suddenly what had been stable and steady was unmistakably harder.

"Of course we're not past it," I said loudly, very aware of my splinted wrist now braced against his shoulder more to keep me from losing my balance as he moved us faster than to pull him closer. "It's been almost a week, James! Do you think I've forgotten?" With a jarring smack, he thrust me up against a tree and whatever whirling dance we'd been caught in stopped dead. When he spoke, his voice was very soft and very cold. I realized, all in that instant, that we were all alone at this end of the field.

"Do you think I _have_? I haven't touched you since Victoria, not unless you touched me first. I've been more than patient, and all for those precious little morals of yours." He imbued the word 'morals' with such intense disdain that I curled a little in what was not, could not have been, shame. He narrowed his eyes, inhaling, a wild thing in human skin. "Do you think I couldn't just take you every time you kiss me, every time you look at me like you're looking at me now?" The words took my breath in one hard punch, and when I replied, my voice sounded dizzy and blurred.

"I'm not talking about _sex_," I gritted, concentrating on the words, "I'm talking about _blood_! I'm talking about you _killing _people, James," I went on, and as I heard my own voice ring out among the crickets and the now-distant shouts of the dancing crowd, my heart went cold with understanding. "That's why we're here, isn't it?" I asked him, so much of us touching, my pulse pounding in my ears. "So you can take one of _them_." I jerked my head towards the people across the field. James went still. He didn't breathe, there were no muscular twitches to measure, and yet I could feel it all through him: every piece of him was stopped, suspended, one frozen moment in eternity.

"I'm a killer, B," he said finally, something new in that quiet, alien voice. Surprise? Unease? No. I couldn't say. It was too stark, too matter of fact. Too merciless. A kind of laughter bubbled up in me, and I forced it back. No room for hysteria here, and I wasn't going to be that girl, anyway. Not that girl.

"I can't let you hurt people," I said helplessly, trapped in this tidal wave of him. "I can't kiss you after you've drained some innocent kid!" He laughed, James laughed, only me and the dark and James laughing through the music and the crickets. A bright sort of electricity sparked in his eyes, and I felt things get a little less controlled.

"But you can't stop me, either," he reminded me, and pressed his mouth to mine in a quick, sharp snap. Pulling away, he flashed that predator's grin, a thin line of white, white teeth glinting. "Natural Born Killers, sweetheart; you ever see that movie? You can be my Mallory, my Bonnie." I shoved him with my good arm, disgusted both by the suggestion and by the sly thrill of excitement that I couldn't deny having felt. Mickey and Mallory, lovers on a rampage across America. I snuffed the memory.

"I'm not going to help you murder people!"

"Maybe you should have thought about that before saying you love me," James sneered, and, to my utter horror, I started to cry.

"Fuck you," I snarled, trying not to lose this completely, and James grabbed me by the chin and kissed me again. This time, he wasted no time in deepening the kiss to the point where I could do nothing but respond, my body torn from my mind and wanting him, always wanting him.

His hands spanned my waist and then slid up beneath my shirt, moving down so that his fingers dipped below the waistband of my pants. (Jeans, bought or stolen from a WalMart while I got McDonald's.) I let my good hand work its way up the taut column of James's throat and onto the planes of his face. As his mouth dropped to my neck, hungry and intense, I found my thumb flush against the ridge of his cheekbone just below his left eye. My head falling back against the trunk, I let my instincts push my hips into his and caught my breath at his low groan.

"You know," I managed in a gasp, "I could take your eye out right now." His lashes fluttered against my thumb, his lips at the hollow between my neck and shoulder.

"I could rip your throat out before you moved," he breathed against my skin. As he spoke, his left hand snuck further beneath my waistband and under the elastic band of my underpants.

"Are you sure?" I asked jerkily, my fingers tightening on his face as he used one thigh to spread my legs. "Being half - oh, god! - blind would really help your hunting, I--" I broke off, panting, and felt James grin into my throat as heat tore through me in wild, uncontrollable spikes. I thrust against his hand, mouth open, and felt the tickle of his lashes against the side of my thumb once more. Spent, I shuddered between him and the tree and pushed at his face until he lifted it to mine. Inches between us, I smoothed the pad of my thumb along the ridge of his cheekbone.

"Are you going to hurt me now?" I asked softly, my eyes locked on his. James took a breath and smiled, just the slightest curve of the lip.

"No," he said, dragging it out into a seduction of its own. There was a secret in that liquid voice, shining out through the cracks of him, a kind of unspoken feline pleasure at something I couldn't name. I had the odd but unmistakable feeling that I had taken the wrong stairwell, gotten off at an unintended floor, made a _mistake_. "Let's go," James said as I tried to figure out the real reason for the satisfaction all over his face.

"Not to eat someone," I said darkly, half-distracted, and he closed his hand around mine and tugged me to his side. I clutched at him with both arms as we stumbled backwards towards the car. James chuckled, the anger gone like it had never been.

"No one but you, my dear," he purred, lips against the top of my head. I kept my hand flat against his stomach, my other arm tight around his waist, as we left the cheering crowd to the crickets, to the music, to the night.


	18. Ante

**Thanks for the reviews, mates; you all are awesome. I'm glad I'm successfully making James a sexy beast without taking away the, y'know, _actual_ beast part of him. God, what is it about the bad boys? But if things work out the way I like 'em, Bella won't be such a blushing flower by the end of this ride either.**

The second week went quick, quick and smooth, just this smear of time that sparkled with occasional shards of brightness: James's expression when I tried on the silky black dress he pulled out of nowhere; the way my hand tingled when, at the restaurant he took me to in that dress, he kissed the backs of my fingers in front of the whole world. There were other pieces, too, darker but no less sharp: me screaming at him at stoplights, terrified by the way he seemed to look at braking as a sort of interesting foreign custom more to be chuckled at than followed; the deliberate wrench on my broken wrist as we stormed our way through a late-night parking lot. His eyes, hungry and dark, lingering on a girl with a very short haircut and a very long neck.

But nothing happened, nothing hard and concrete, until the coast.

We traveled more slowly after passing through the mountains, taking more time with the road and ourselves. A morning in Radford. A whole day in Charlottesville, for hiking. And then the beach, all sand and surf and cold grey sky. James took me to the Atlantic for some unsaid reason of his own, maybe as a prelude for leaving the country altogether, maybe just as a sort of landmark in our cross-country skid. The opposing twin of the ocean on the other side of the nation was cold, and wild, and thick with salt. Once there, the car left behind a hardened and scrubby series of dunes, James told me to take off my shoes and feel the fine, sinking weave of the beach itself.

"I never liked beaches when I was like you," he told me as we made our way down the barren shore, eyes on the sea, handing out this precious piece of information as casually as a comment on the weather. I grabbed it, though, and knew immediately what he meant. James had taken to referring to his human life (not that he did it often) through these euphemistic comparisons to me. _Like you. Your kind._ As if this way, he could keep the differences between us muted, muffled, could keep me calm and happy and prevent a meltdown about the very thing such comments brought to the forefront: my humanity, and his lack.

I waited.

"The sand was annoying," he went on, as I'd hoped, "and swimming… I never understood how dropping yourself into a freezing expanse of water with nothing but your own hands to keep you afloat was meant to be a good time." He smiled ruefully, someplace else inside his mind, and shook his head.

"But now?" I asked obligingly, picking my way between piles of dull, abandoned seaweed that glistened wetly in the mid-morning sun. James, moving with his customary sleek deliberation, had his hands in his pockets. He shrugged.

"Now…. Now I like all of it. The ocean. The mountains. Wild places. Still don't swim, though." I nodded.

"I can't really imagine you in a city. Living there, I mean." He laughed once, glanced sideways at me.

"Too much temptation," he suggested, and I couldn't tell if it fell more on the side of question or statement. Uncomfortable with either, I bent and picked up a shell. Pretending to inspect the glossy marbled interior and the sand that caked it to its jagged edge, I spoke without looking up.

"Do you like it that much?" I didn't elaborate. He didn't need me to.

"It doesn't matter," James said, surprising me. He didn't sound contemptuous or angry, but rather pensive and almost distant. It was something about the rhythm of the waves, maybe, or the coolness of the day. "Liking, disliking. It's… the intensity. Feeling lives, taking lives, the hunt. I lived for it. There was nothing else." I noted the past tense, was not quite daring enough to question it.

"And blood," I said instead, needing him to keep talking. I wanted… to know? To hear? I wanted. Maybe that was all.

"Blood," he repeated, and the word came different from his lips. I shivered, partly chilly, partly something else. "You'll understand all of this, though," James added, almost as an afterthought. "Soon enough." I paused, the shell still in my hand.

"Meaning?" His look went sly and slanted as he paced ahead of me.

"You're with me now, B," his recent nickname for me equal parts familiar and strange. I could count on one hand the times he'd called me by name, and even now just having a letter seemed like progress. "Eventually, you'll feel it." Suspicious of him, I narrowed my eyes.

"I won't kill for you," I said shortly, halting. James prowled around in front of me, never completely still. "We had this talk before."

"There will come a time," James replied confidently, "when you will do anything I ask." I shook my head, stepping back.

"Not while I'm human," I retorted, palming the shell. "I told you, I won't let you hurt people!"

"You don't have a say," he began, but I cut him off.

"Don't I? You wanted to kill when we went dancing, and you didn't. It's been two weeks, and you haven't. You care about what I think, whether you admit it or not!" His look tightened almost imperceptibly, the pieces of his face drawing close and sharp. Before I'd fully refilled my lungs, his hand was clamped around my upper arm. Not quite hard enough to hurt or leave a mark, but tightly enough that when he moved, I had no choice but to stumble after him.

"My shoes!" I cried as we moved swiftly down the beach towards the pier that extended out from a boarded pedestrian mall. James ignored me.

"You have a say?" he asked, but it didn't sound like that much of a question to me. "You're right, babe, you have a say." We were walking fast, almost running, and I had to take two strides to keep up with every one of his. Even at this pace, with me in tow, James was as smooth and graceful as the seabirds that circled above us. As we neared the pier, a distinct sense of foreboding snuck up the center of my gut into my ribs. My heart started to pound, my legs half-tripping as I tried not to fall.

"What are you—" But I stopped almost at once, the words sticking in my throat as James suddenly brought us to a dead halt. We were about twenty feet from the wooden pier, facing slightly away from the sea and towards a small outdoors café situated just where the dock met the boardwalk. At 11:23 AM, there were only three or four people at the café. They sat hunched over coffee or blocked by the newspapers that kept threatening to blow away in the brisk ocean breeze.

"Slim pickings," James said in mock-thoughtfulness, "but we'll make do. Go ahead, B." The sense of grim expectation bloomed into a very present dread, and I only became aware of my head shaking in denial after the third swing.

"What?" I asked, hoping that I'd be wrong, knowing I was not. James smiled, the hand on my arm snaking around my shoulders.

"Give me your opinion," he clarified. "Tell me your thoughts. _Pick one_."

Oh.

Oh, god.

* * *

She was trembling inside the curve of his arm. He found that satisfying, reassuring. The fear on her face, too, made him feel a bit better; things had been starting to get severely out of hand. Dancing? Hiking? All this careful kissing and stopping when she asked him to and—but worse than that, _telling_ her things? _Confiding_ in her? Sure, he hadn't exactly been a font of information, but already the girl (who was B now, in his head, a nickname he was sure no one else used and therefore was his alone, and the fact that she had a _name_ when he thought of her erased any hope that this had all been some sort of ridiculous phase) knew more about his past than Victoria ever had.

And what was more… she was right.

He hadn't killed.

Because of her.

He'd surprised himself right along with her by being gentle, by doing what he knew she thought of as 'normal' things together and even enjoying them in a strange, surreal kind of way, that was one thing. The sex (or lack thereof) was all right, too; it made for an interesting and intriguing change of pace from Victoria's constant desire for him. Or, no, that wasn't it because B wanted him too, and most of the time—she just had more self-control. Which, oddly enough, he found exciting. Pushing her. Seeing how far he could go before she cracked and jumped him.

But this…

Even if it wasn't for the reasons she imagined, the girl was still right. He hadn't been feeding. Hadn't been killing. And it was entirely because of her. She still didn't understand, of course. That was obvious. She thought he was going soft, softer than he'd already gone, anyway. Like the telepath and his clan. But that aside, no matter what her conclusions or how false they may have been, the bare facts remained and James was not pleased. He felt… he didn't know how he felt, but this was ending and it was ending now. She had enough power already, with her soft voice and her damning eyes. He refused to give her this, too. Besides, making her pick his prey might actually work in his favor…

"No," she said, not unexpectedly. "No, I can't. I won't." He lowered his chin to murmur by her ear, eying the stragglers at the café.

"Come on, it's not hard. Just choose one. The rest will be fine, and I'll stop checking out all those nice, tasty tourists we've been passing." He snickered gamely and ignored the quiet curl of unease that seemed to crop up every time he hurt her lately. Which, incidentally, he hadn't. Generally. "Close your eyes, if you like," he offered helpfully, enjoying the pounding of her heart against his chest. "Just close your eyes and point."

Suddenly, her right hand flashed up and drew a jagged line of sharp, beautiful pain down his jaw. She'd been aiming for his cheek, had struck low, was regrouping: he saw it in a glint, a gleam, a milky, opalized shell. He caught her fist and squeezed the base; she gasped, and, as her fingers convulsed open against her will, dropped the shell.

"Smart girl," he told her lowly, more surprised than anything else. Impressed, even. "Upping the ante, are we?" And he pulled her in front of him and wrapped his arms around her like a straightjacket. She was struggling. She was helpless. He kept his eyes on the people by the dock, voice gone thick with a near-snarl. "But not good enough, B, not nearly, and you really need to _choose_."

"Don't!" she cried, almost-cried, fear and anger and dread all biting through her voice like wolves. "Don't make me, you can't do this!"

"But you can," he countered, the snarl dropped, smooth as wine. "Either pick one, or I kill them all." Horrified, she tried to twist away. He grappled for her, her cool skin damp where he touched it, salt-sticky. She was so weak next to him, next to them, so weak, and yet she fought him. Some kind of hot, fierce emotion burst inside him, up near his heart, not lust or anger or affection but a kind of wild, gasping pride.

He held her, and finally, in a voice barely loud enough for the waves to allow, his girl chose.

It was easy, really. Taking him. It was always easy.

After, Bella crouching against the far corner of the small lifeguard shack into which they'd enticed the middle-aged man with glasses and a slight potbelly, he wiped his chin on the man's blue t-shirt. He dropped the man, stepping lightly over the body and crossing the sandy floor in two easy strides. She flinched when he reached her before he even lifted a hand, her face turned down and white, a ghost in the shadows. Carefully, James knelt and took her hand from where it was shaking at her throat. A small noise escaped her at his touch. Sated, he felt no more confusion or anger or need to beat her down. He felt, instead, the need to lift her up. To make things clear. He'd done enough, he decided, and if he pushed her too hard now he risked breaking her for good and that just wouldn't do.

Pulling her gently to her feet, he moved aside so she could see the body. It took a second, but then her lips parted and he knew she'd seen.

"He's breathing," she whispered, shocked. James allowed a small smile, a distinct satisfaction at the tightening of her hand around his. _You_, he thought abstractly, _are mine_.

"We don't have to kill," he explained quietly. "If we're careful about the bite, they don't get the poison and, if we stop in time, they can recover. He'll be found as soon as the afternoon guard starts his shift. Sooner if you scream. Not now," he added hurriedly as Bella opened her mouth, "but right before we leave."

"And he'll be okay?"

"He'll be okay," James lied. He had no idea if the human would survive the bite or not. He'd taken care with where he drew the blood, true; he'd stopped before the slowing of the heartbeat, but it really was impossible to tell if someone was strong enough to live through a vampire attack or not. Not that she needed to know that. And really, the fact that he hadn't killed the man outright should be enough. The Cullens might have a hard time stopping in time, or so he'd heard; going cold turkey on blood meant that once you got any at all, your system went on overdrive. He, however, was practiced enough that if he _needed_ to stop, he could. Generally speaking. When sex wasn't involved, or a real fight. But anyway, he hadn't killed the human and he hadn't poisoned him and therefore he felt that a goddamn medal might be appropriate.

It was enough, however, that Bella laced her fingers through his for a firmer grip and let him lead her out of the shack without another word.

_One step at a time_, James reminded himself. And soon… soon, his self-control wouldn't be an issue at all.


	19. Intimacy

**This is rather short and sweet, people, and I'm sorry about that but I figured you'd want something now rather than waiting for me to work out another few segments. I'm actually in the process of moving into college (woohoo!) right now, so things are pretty hectic and I don't have time to sit down and spend a few hours a day writing. But I'll do my best, and I'll try to have chapters posted as quick as I can manage. :) Please, keep up the reviews, because they do constantly make my day.**

**Oh, in response to one review in particular (I'm sorry; I don't remember your name but I'm sure you'll know who you are) I do indeed take suggestions. I can't promise to work them in, but I love to hear them and I will follow them if at all possible.**

That night, we stayed in a touristy hotel on Ocracoke Island. I wanted to check the news, to find out if there was anything about the man we'd left on the beach a few hours down the coast, but at the same time the thought of trying to find out made me shaky and afraid. What if he was dead? What then? It would make me a murderer. Sure, I hadn't killed him, but I'd pointed him out. I'd stood mute, terrified, and watched him walk out of his life and into hell. I'd let James do it.

_But he's alive_, some quiet part of me said into the twists of my thoughts as I absently washed my face in the tiny bathroom. _James didn't kill him, and so you didn't kill him. It was all just… just a powerplay, a dominance thing. You challenged him, and he had to challenge you back._

Why, though? Why hadn't he gone through with it and just killed the human? I didn't dare think it was for my sake anymore; my brain wouldn't quite let me take that risk again. Or, not entirely for my sake. But it had to have been, right? Because what possible reason other than that existed? James was a killer. He'd said it himself. It was, he'd said, what he lived for.

Or what he _had_ lived for.

Did that mean he lived for me, now? Surely not. That was some romance story bullshit. He had some other agenda, I was sure of it now. He hadn't been killing because of me, maybe, but it couldn't be because he knew I didn't want him to. If that were the case, he wouldn't have forced me through that mindfuck. He wouldn't have made me think I'd helped end some stranger's life, not if he cared that much about my feelings. Then again, James's views on emotions were fairly messed up in general; maybe that was how he…

I didn't know. I didn't know.

None of it made sense.

It seemed like every time I got through to a side of James that wasn't sarcastic, cruel, cynical, he turned around and did something terrible. Maybe that was the point. Maybe he was so uncomfortable with actually caring about me that he couldn't bring himself to do it properly. Or maybe he didn't actually care at all; maybe what we'd gone through in Dr. Thomas's office had been a lie? But no, that couldn't be; I felt it every time he touched me gently, every time he listened when I asked him something. I felt it in his small kindnesses, the ones he didn't mention and that I could tell he was embarrassed about having performed.

"Are you done yet? You've been in there for fifteen minutes."

"I have not," I retorted automatically, although I had. _Sorry for taking so long, baby, I'm only trying to figure out if you're the Devil or just, I don't know, his son._

He laughed from the room, and I glanced to my left. James was sprawled on his back across the single bed, arms flopped out to either side like wings. It _could_ have been imposing or seductive. It was adorable. I couldn't help the smile that spread across my face at the sight of him; he just looked so—so pleased with himself, like a kid who's just won a video game tournament. Ever since he'd fed at the beach, James had been different. Lighter, quicker to snort or even outright laugh. Even while I disapproved of the reasons for the change, I couldn't stop myself from being caught up in his good mood.

"I want new clothes," I said, tugging at the waistband of my jeans and eying the band of my underwear beneath it critically. "New underwear, at least. Washing clothes in sinks is great and all, but it's not really the best thing ever for fabric."

"You want new underwear?" he repeated, and just like that the cute twelve-year-old vanished. I looked at him again, and all he'd done was turn his head towards me but the damage was done. My heartbeat quickened. James smirked. "You've got to earn them."

I licked my lips, and took a sharp sliver of pleasure at the way his eyes fixed on my mouth with the movement.

"And how," I asked slowly, "should I do that?" My stomach flickered with nerves, but the urge to play along, to take advantage of his good temper while it lasted, was too much to ignore. We hadn't actually slept together since the forest, unbelievable as it sounded, and now here he was in a proper bed, happy, not filled with bloodlust… And hadn't I waited? Hadn't I waited _weeks_?

James pushed himself up with his elbows, bending one knee thoughtfully.

"Well," he started, drawing it out and looking at the ceiling, "I'd hate to waste money. Then I'd have to steal more, and I have so much _respect_ for human laws. So you'd have to prove that they're really… worn out…" The fact that he was keeping it going, this banter between us, made my heart pound with a funny mixture of amusement, excitement and an undeniable giddiness. I leaned against the open doorway to the bathroom.

"But they're not, really," I said, frowning, my hand lingering at my hip, the thumb hooked beneath my waistband. "Just a little old. If they should get torn, though…" James took in a breath, almost sharply, and hummed in agreement.

"Yes," he said softly, "that would be bad. We'd definitely have to get you new ones then."

"And as for bras?" I went on, shaking my head. "Half the time I don't even wear one. If I just had a _nice_ one, maybe, but…"

"You're wearing one now," he countered, eyes falling on me, lids half-closed. "I suppose it's not pretty."

"_I_ don't think so." Lips curled, nostrils flared. My face burned, but my voice was steady, low, more seductive than I'd ever expected I could be.

"Show me," James said, and his own voice was just a shade rougher than before. I tugged off my shirt, thanking god it didn't get stuck on my elbows, and dropped it at my feet. It _wasn't_ a pretty bra, but it left me in less than most bathing suit tops. James's pupils dilated out, eyes going black, and he lifted his chin. "And the bottoms?" My breath caught, embarrassment zapping around like a spark inside me. I couldn't believe I was standing here, doing some kind of halting striptease. _Me_. Bella Swan.

But my fingers were at the zipper of my jeans before I had time to really consider it any further, and, moving very slowly, I slid them down my thighs, my calves, stepped out of the pants one foot after the other. Standing before him in my panties and my bra, I wondered if my entire body was as red as my face must have been. His eyes moved steadily across me, painfully slow, each moment of tension between us making my skin vibrate.

"Come here," James told me then, the words low and rasping and delighted.

And I did.

* * *

My head fit into the dip in his shoulder like it was designed specifically for that, the long lines of his body smoothing effortlessly into the more delicate lines of mine. I lay on my side, one arm slung over his stomach, my left leg hooked over his, our feet mingling. His right arm curled possessively around my back, pillowing my neck, his other arm up beneath his head as he lay staring at the ceiling.

"That was…"

(Skin on skin, hands on bellies, thighs, breasts, rough wet tongue circling lower—)

"Better than on the ground, in the mud?" he finished for me, a smile in his voice if not on his face. I felt my lips twitch in response, and ducked my head against his shoulder.

"I can't really answer that," I admitted, and James's chest rumbled with a suppressed chuckle.

"Something about the violence, huh?" It could have been a taunt. Instead, his arm squeezed me slightly and then relaxed, and I smiled.

"You're corrupting me," I complained.

"Yes," he said, satisfied. "I am." Later, this would worry me. Now, I just turned my face into the mattress to hide the stupid grin.


	20. LEMON

**So this is a James/Bella lemon, specifically for naoman16, but also for the various others who requested lemons. I don't usually write explicit sex scenes, simply because I don't know if I'm that good at them and I'm more plot-oriented, but I gave it a try here. So hopefully you'll tell me if it's up to standard. Also, naoman16, depending on feedback, I might go on to fulfill more of your lemon requests, but this scene has a few things you wanted, I think. :)**

**NOTE: This is set a few hours after the scene where Bella and James are dancing outside and they fight/end up nearly having sex against a tree.**

There was a motel, finally. By the time we pulled into the same gravel-spattered asphalt lot as each one before it, exhaustion had spread and risen, overtaking each separate piece of me until I felt it all over, draining me down. James opened my door for me, an oddly civil habit of his. My feet stung hitting the pavement. We'd danced for longer than I'd first thought we would, long enough for the echoes of movement to reverberate through my legs even now, an hour after leaving. Considering how much my body ached as it was, I was almost grateful that we'd been cut off when we had, even if it had taken... well, extreme measures.

"You look tired," he said with interest, touching the circles under my eyes. I smiled in spite of myself, bemused.

"What, you haven't been tired before?"

"I'm sure it's like riding a bike," he said thoughtfully, turning to lead me into the motel.

"Not that you'll get the chance to see." He shook his head slightly, nostrils flaring. My mouth twisted wryly. It was times like these that I felt short-changed in the evolutionary pool. I would never breathe in and smell, from miles away, trees. A deer. Anything. He would never feel the joys of complete exhaustion. Damn.

I drifted as James bought a room, or charmed one out of the girl behind the counter, disgustingly accustomed to the mellifluous way he could say a perfectly ordinary sentence and turn it into something irresistible. There was a large corkboard on one wall studded with lone pushpins, scraps of paper torn away at the corner, advertisements for local attractions. Missing persons. A girl my age, her dark eyes staring out from a smudged, pixilated distortion of what was probably, in life, a pretty face. I scanned the sheet, looking for a name. Christy Hanes. Seventeen. She'd gone missing two years ago, from a mall in a nearby town, wearing jeans and a purple sweatshirt. Her family offered a reward for any news. The writing was short, sparse, to the point. No pleading, no desperation. Somebody knew Christy Hanes wasn't coming home.

I looked at those blank black eyes and felt a thrill.

Somewhere on a dirty corkboard in Washington State, I was on a wall staring out.

Charlie would be driving himself slowly insane. The window, the window of time in which I would be found, was closing. His hope would be slight by now, a tiny clear spot through which, just maybe, he could make out some blurred reflection of my face. He would be looking, of course. Still.

James's hand closed around my elbow, then slid across my back to the curve of my waist. He followed my gaze.

"She looks like you," he commented blandly. And we went upstairs.

The room, like the drive, was like every other room of its kind. Small, cold, the air vaguely old-tasting. I wrinkled my nose, and went to one of the two beds.

"I'm going to sleep," I announced, stripping off my jeans and collapsing face-down onto the mattress.

It was only seconds before I felt his hand, light as air, trace from the bottom of my spine to the nape of my neck.

"No," James told me quietly, his fingers cool and steady at the corners of my jaw, the pressure just enough that my eyes fluttered open. He could snap my neck in an instant. "You're not." I rolled over, his hand staying on the back of my neck to cushion it as he knelt, shirtless, over me on the bed. His eyes went from my face to my throat to lower, tracing over my chest and stomach as if the bra and shirt I wore were made of transparent silk instead of cheap cotton. I frowned.

"_You_ may not get tired," I reminded him, "but I do. We were dancing for hours!"

"And we're not done," he replied roughly, lips curling in a feral smile that showed little humor and many teeth. Sweeping his arms up my sides, James caught my wrists in his hands and pinned them against the headboard behind me. Despite the aching of my legs and back, a thrill sent my body trembling and my breath quickened. _Damn you for that_, I thought, a kind of quiet violence. _Damn you for making me want you so fucking much._

My thighs slid up, my legs wrapping around his waist as he shifted to kneel between them. James bent to kiss me, and I moved before my stinging muscles could talk me out of it. With a sharp twist of my hips, I used the fact that James had no hold on the bed itself to jerk him around to the side, yanking my hands down out of his grasp in his moment of surprise. A second after I'd moved, our positions were reversed, me straddling his hips, my hands holding his above his head. I knew he could get out of the hold quicker than it would take for me to even consider trying to keep him there, but with the adrenaline of taking control rushing through me, I didn't even feel the nervousness, let alone my sore body.

"I've had enough of you being on top for a while," I said breathlessly, my heart pounding.

"Oh?" I rocked my hips, feeling James's erection press against me, and his eyes slid shut for a long moment.

"That's right," I agreed, a smile beginning to play at the corners of my lips, letting go of his wrists to rake my nails down the soft insides of his forearms, all the way down to his chest. Of course there was no skin beneath my nails when I was done, but pale pink welts rose along his flesh, a visible mark of our kind of love.

"Mm," James murmured, eyes slitting open to watch me lazily, catlike, half-purring as I bent and took his left nipple between my teeth. I bit just hard enough to feel the skin begin to give, and then swirled my tongue around the hard nub before lifting my head to gauge his reaction. He was holding onto the headboard, his clenched knuckles the only sign of any loss of control. Closing my teeth briefly on my lower lip, I felt his hips thrust up involuntarily and ducked forward to lick his cheek with one swift, rough swipe. Licking my lips, I tasted him on my tongue and rolled my hips again. His nostrils flared wildly, and I knew he was being bombarded with my lust and my excitement. I ran my nails down his sides, digging into each dip of the ribcage, feeling the muscles of his stomach clench as I neared the waistband of his jeans. I dipped my fingers beneath the denim, then undid the button and slid down his thighs to take the tab of his zipper in my teeth. Slowly, my fingers tracing heavy spirals on his stomach and chest, I pulled the zipper down and pressed my mouth against the strained cotton boxers beneath. His erection jumped in response, his belly contracting beneath my hands, and I chuckled before working my way back up his chest with my lips, finding the contours of musculature with my tongue and the tiny, hard balls of his nipples with my teeth.

"If you're going to fuck me," I told him, face pressed into his throat, breath hot on his skin, "I'm going to have to fuck you first."

My teeth closing on the skin of his throat, I reached one hand down and pushed my fingers through the slit in his boxers, gripping his dick and stroking it up, bringing it out into the now-heated air.

"Yes," James breathed, letting go of the headboard and running his fingers roughly through my hair before moving his grip to my waist, then up to my breasts. He palmed them, thumbs teasing my nipples, and I shoved my underwear aside against my inner thigh. Without letting him thrust inside me, I rocked my hips over him, feeling him slide through the wetness there. He closed his eyes, rumbling with pleasure, upper lip curling up in frustration as I tortured him with my hips and teeth.

"Do you want it?" I asked, voice low and sugar-hot. He said nothing, lifting his head to take my breast in his mouth. His tongue worked my nipple, and I felt that tongue straight down inside me. I reached back and stroked his balls, my fingers dipping inside my own wetness and then sliding across his erection. James pulled away from my breast, eyes glinting.

"_Shit_," he gasped, and then slid his eyes shut. "Give it to me," he said then, hoarse. "Fuck me, B."

I smiled, triumphant, and thrust down onto him.

When he came, finally, it was with one hand between my legs, fingers playing with my clit, our mouths pressed together and open, my warm breath heating us both. My body rocked with my own climax, the shudders forcing me to cry out with the explosion. I collapsed against his chest, feeling him still inside me, my lips in the hollow of his neck and shoulder.

"Jesus," I muttered, trembling.

"I think I like you on top," James replied, the words vibrating through his chest and into mine.

"Me, too," I said, unwilling to move. "Me, too."


End file.
